Guardian Australia reveals that the system is being flooded with AI-generated material inventing studies and attributing nonexistent research to real academics and authors, and it found at least 39 submissions to political inquiries containing what appear to be hallucinated references, while Christian Downie, a professor in the Australian National University’s school of regulation and global governance, warns that if the phenomenon continues, there is a significant risk of parliamentarians making decisions based on evidence that does not exist.
The researchers report that a register mismatch can turn a high-performing retrieval system into an inequitable one, with BM25 Recall@1 falling from 84% to 16% and Recall@5 from 100% to 44%, and that a plain-to-formal lexicon bridge lifts plain-query BM25 Recall@5 from 44% to 80%.
Brookings reports that in the 2026 budget, federal AI funds obligated rose to $7.2 billion (up 966% from 2024), potential awards rose to $91.8 billion (up 1,912%), and a department’s potential contract value rose to $90.7 billion, representing 98.9% of the federal AI spend.
Brazil announced an open platform that brings together artificial intelligence projects and ideas aimed at improving public services and strengthening cooperation between institutions, accepts both solutions already in operation and ideas at an early stage of development, and complements Ibict’s work in organising, managing and disseminating scientific and technological information.