Big Four consulting firm Ernst & Young retracted a Canadian cybersecurity research report on May 14, 2026, after AI-detection firm GPTZero published an investigation alleging that 60 percent of the document's citations were fabricated by generative AI tools. The GPTZero investigation identified 16 hallucinated citations out of the report's 27 references . Among the most striking findings was a citation to a non-existent McKinsey & Co. document titled the "Loyalty Economics Report," which the researchers traced to what they describe as a "secondhand hallucination". An AI model appears to have ingested a fictitious reference from a separate online publication, FinancialIT.net, and reproduced it inside the EY document as authoritative. The episode lands at a sensitive moment for the consulting industry's AI positioning. EY claimed in October 2025 that AI-related revenue had grown 30 percent over the prior year and that 15,000 staff had worked on AI client projects "ranging from delivering enterprise-wide transformations to AI governance frameworks that help drive the responsible implementation of AI."