Citations Make AI Hallucinate More, Not Less — A Major New Study

Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0800

You’d think that adding a citation to an AI’s answer would make it more trustworthy. A link to a scientific paper. A reference to a legal precedent. A footnote pointing to a medical journal. Surely the AI has checked its sources, right?

Wrong. A landmark new study accepted at ICML 2026 — one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences — reveals something deeply counterintuitive: citations make large language models more likely to hallucinate, not less.

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Citations Make AI Hallucinate More, Not Less — A Major New Study