dont be so sure they didnt. they can go back and forth hallucinating with each other

This is where the absolutism of let agents to 100% of the work fails. You get adversarial agents pulling all reverences into a table, they might miss some, so run this a few times.

Then have another set of agents, with skills like web browsing (to verify that links actually exist, maybe that references and abstracts actually match, etc), have one engineer (or agent) write a small script to help with this (just make sure you test it, and a bit).

So your work is not verified until your references table is 90% green checkmarks, maybe with uncertainty figures.

A human can then verify the ones with under 90% certainty.

This alone gets you a long way there. Does not costs the millions they're being paid.

It's quite interesting that these companies marketed themselves as them best of the best in excellence, accept no mistakes. I can imagine the countless keynotes and books about this. Or the sales pitches.

Has always been a lie, they just understood how to hide it. Today they don't, and it's embarrassing.