Catching the Hallucination Before It Ships

A barrister files a brief and the citations turn out not to exist. A clinical chatbot recommends a dose that no formulary s. A finance assistant reports a figure that traces back to nothing. Through 2025 and into 2026 the pattern has repeated across courtrooms, consulting rooms and trading desks, and it has hardened into the central obstacle to putting generative systems anywhere that the answer carries consequence. The failure is not occasional incompetence. It is structural.