LLM Fabricated Detailed Chinese Website for Airtable That Has Never Existed
A developer running a benchmarking harness against six Chinese LLM APIs discovered that GLM confidently described a fully detailed official Chinese website for Airtable — including pricing, terms of service, and a localized privacy policy — that has never existed. The domain airtable.cn has been registered to a private individual since 2016 and returns a 502 error, yet the model cited it as the most important source for verifying the company's credibility. The hallucination was especially dangerous because it consisted of mundane, specific details — like a privacy policy URL — that most reviewers would never think to verify. The researcher's automated quality checks, which monitored error rates and answer-length distributions across 4,023 responses, flagged nothing unusual since the fabricated citation appeared in a single, well-formed answer among thousands. A follow-up WHOIS and curl check across eight brands took roughly ten minutes and revealed that several .cn domains for major software brands are held by private individuals rather than the companies themselves.
