Bureaucratic Glitch: South Africa Delays AI Regulation Due to Neural Network Hallucinations

The attempt to tame algorithms turned into a tragicomedy. On May 26, 2026, the South African authorities announced that the revised artificial intelligence policy would not be presented until at least January 2027. The delay was caused by an unprecedented scandal: the previous draft of the government document had to be withdrawn in disgrace.

The reason for the withdrawal perfectly describes the current stage of AI Governance development: officials generated the text of the law using a large language model (LLM), which filled the official document with non-existent fake links and hallucinations. Regulators became victims of the very tool they were trying to restrict. This case demonstrates that the state apparatuses of developing countries are not yet technologically ready to form sovereign digital policies and blindly rely on commercial neural networks without understanding the mechanics of their operation.

Source: Reuters