Western Australia's government is asking Deloitte for a fast refund after a report on merging three of the state's universities turned out to contain AI-generated references to sources that do not exist.
The report also carried wrong cost totals. A government spokesperson said the state was very disappointed and had written to Deloitte about the refund. The state is the client here, and it is pressing the consultancy directly rather than waiting out a review.
Two separate failures sit in that complaint, and they are not equally forgivable. Fabricated citations are a familiar flaw of AI text generators, which can produce references that look plausible but point nowhere. Anyone who has checked a footnote knows the risk, and a professional firm is paid to check. The wrong cost totals are the more serious problem for this kind of document. A merger case rests on what the combination would cost, and a footnote can be wrong without changing a decision in a way a bad total can. The complaint as described does not say the AI caused the arithmetic errors, so the two should not be lumped together.
What the episode shows is where the accountability lands. The state did not blame the software. It went to the firm that signed off on the report and asked for its money back, which is the ordinary remedy for work that does not meet the brief.
The open question is what clients will now ask for before they pay: a disclosure of where AI was used, or a guarantee that a person checked every reference and every sum.