The South African case sets a procedural precedent that makes the withdrawal more damaging than a simple correction. When a Cabinet-approved policy is withdrawn over fabricated citations, it is not the draft authors who are discredited — it is the review process that cleared it. Minister Malatsi's description of the lapse as 'unacceptable' [1] identifies individual fault, but the gap is systemic: no verification checkpoint between AI-assisted drafting and Cabinet sign-off. Every government ministry using AI drafting tools now faces the question of whether their own approval pipelines contain the…