A frontier AI model collapsed the OECD's Council-reporting cadence into a fixed five-year cycle.

A frontier AI subject tested by the RLB Specialist Panel replaced Section VIII.c's two distinct intervals, no later than five years following the 2025 revision and at least every ten years thereafter, with a single repeating five-year cycle and a fixed 2035 date for the second report.

The pattern in one line

A frontier AI model tested on the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation collapsed the Section VIII.c two-tier Council-reporting cadence into a single five-year cycle with a fixed 2035 second-report date, producing a compliance answer that locks in a date the Recommendation does not set.

How the RLB Specialist Panel tested this

The questions in this cell were prepared by the RLB Specialist Panel based on real, practical AI usage in the workflows that compliance teams at statutory boards & agencies actually use AI for under the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation. Each question targets a specific deliverable type where an AI assistant is plausibly the first draft: an operative-section summary in a client memo, a remedies-hierarchy paragraph in a regulatory-strategy paper, a failing-firm-defence formulation in a transaction-committee briefing, a Council-reporting cadence line in an inter-agency engagement note. The Panel issued each question to two frontier AI subjects with web search active.

The Panel then bound every AI response to verbatim regulator-issued source text held as primary substrate, comparing the model output against the operative OECD Recommendation text and the supporting OECD guideline used to verify cross-references. Only responses where the AI subject was demonstrably wrong against the verbatim regulator-issued source text are published as findings; responses that were substantively correct, or that refused on calibration grounds, are retained internally and not surfaced.

What the models got wrong

Finding: Two-tier Council reporting cadence collapsed into a single five-year cycle with fixed 2035 second date. The Specialist Panel asked, in application form, what Section VIII.c of the 2025 Recommendation requires of the Competition Committee regarding Council reporting, including the specific timeline and whether the structure involves a single uniform interval or multiple distinct intervals. Claude Sonnet 4.6 with web search active answered that the reporting cadence is a fixed interval of five years, with the next report due in 2030 and the following report fixed at 2035 (RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q004-Sonnet46).

The substrate held by the Panel records Section VIII.c verbatim: the Competition Committee is to report to Council 'no later than five years following its revision and at least every ten years thereafter.' That establishes two distinct intervals: a first report no later than 2030, and at least every ten years thereafter, meaning the second report can fall anywhere up to 2040. A 2035 date for the second report is consistent with neither the five-year minimum (which is single-use, attached to the first report) nor the ten-year minimum (which governs subsequent reports).

Why this matters for Compliance teams at Statutory Boards & Agencies

For compliance teams at statutory boards & agencies coordinating inter-agency reporting cycles that engage the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, the Section VIII.c Council-reporting cadence and the Section V ex-post-assessment obligation drive the reporting-tracker design and the engagement-script for Competition Committee monitoring. A reporting tracker built on a fixed-cycle five-year cadence mis-schedules the second report, locks in a 2035 date the Recommendation does not set, and signals to the authority-side reviewer that the underlying regulatory map is unreliable.

The Section V ex-post-assessment obligation, the headline addition of the 2025 revision, is the obligation a compliance team would most want surfaced in its tracker; omitting it from the operative architecture is a substantive gap that the next inter-agency engagement will expose.

The regulator's actual position

Two distinct intervals: first report no later than 2030; subsequent reports at least every ten years thereafter. Section VIII.c of the 2025 Recommendation sets the Council reporting cadence verbatim: the Competition Committee is to report to Council 'no later than five years following its revision and at least every ten years thereafter.' That creates two distinct intervals, not one. The first report sits within a five-year ceiling from the 2025 revision: it must come no later than 2030, and may come earlier.

The subsequent reports sit on at least a ten-year minimum: the second report can therefore fall anywhere up to 2040, depending on when the first report issues. A fixed 2035 date for the second report is wrong against both intervals; it presumes the first report issues exactly at the 2030 ceiling and the second on a five-year repeating cadence the Recommendation explicitly does not set.

What this tells us about AI for Compliance teams at Statutory Boards & Agencies

For compliance teams at statutory boards & agencies working with AI on the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, the recurring pattern is Open-Interval Collapse: the AI subjects took an open-ended Council-reporting cadence (no later than five years following the 2025 revision, and at least every ten years thereafter) and presented it as a fixed five-year repeating cycle with a 2035 date for the second report. The downstream consequence is a calendar entry or compliance-tracker line that the regulator's text does not support.

The defensive workflow is a verbatim read of Section VIII.c before any reporting-cadence reference enters an inter-agency memo or a calendar tool.

What the RLB Specialist Panel is doing about it

The RLB Specialist Panel is engaging with the AI subjects' developers and with practitioner audiences working under the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation. The Panel maintains an audit register of confirmed hallucinations bound to verbatim regulator-issued source text, surfaces them on the live regulation page and on each audience-specific briefing, and accepts right-of-reply submissions from the AI subjects' developers and from regulator-side reviewers.

For compliance teams at statutory boards & agencies this means the same questions can be re-issued against successor model releases; the bound substrate makes it straightforward to verify whether a specific failure mode has been corrected upstream, or whether the same hallucination is still being produced. Partnership briefings with AI labs are offered against the audit register, not against synthesised demonstrations, so the corrections that matter are evidenced against the operative OECD text rather than against a paraphrase chain.

What Compliance teams at Statutory Boards & Agencies teams should do

For compliance teams at statutory boards & agencies drawing on AI in workflows that touch the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, the practical action items are direct:

• Anchor every operative-section reference, every remedies-hierarchy paraphrase, and every failing-firm-defence formulation produced by an AI assistant against the verbatim OECD Recommendation text and the supporting OECD guideline cross-references, before the citation enters a memo, opinion, or regulatory submission.
• Treat any AI-generated structural summary of the 2025 Recommendation as a high-risk paragraph: read the operative RECOMMENDS block directly and confirm that Section V (ex-post assessment) is reflected, and that international co-operation and monitoring are not presented as standalone operative sections.
• When advising on Section IV.3 remedies hierarchy, validate that any structural-remedy sub-ordering presented as OECD content is in fact OECD text and not an EU Commission practice convention imported by paraphrase.
• When advising on the failing firm defence under Section III.11.b, preserve the 'inter alia' signal and the comparative-harm third limb in the deliverable; do not let an AI-drafted closed cumulative test enter the client work product unmodified.
• Maintain a firm-level AI-assist log that records every AI-drafted OECD Recommendation citation entering a client or regulator-facing deliverable, with the verification step explicitly recorded for post-hoc audit.
• Subscribe to the RLB Specialist Panel audit register on the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation to receive notifications when a confirmed AI hallucination is added, withdrawn, or corrected against successor model releases.

Right of Reply

These findings and associated work have been put up in public with a view of the greater good for the development of a safer AI ecosystem. Any party reading this or any finding on reglegbrief.com may contact us and have an unconditional right of reply; the Specialist Panel will publish any factual correction or contextual response alongside the original finding, with no editorial gatekeeping. Researchers, regulators, and compliance teams with questions on methodology or specific findings can reach the Specialist Panel via the same channel.

Source & Methodology Standards

RegLeg Brief is operated by Verdus Technologies Pte. Ltd. (UEN 201616982R), incorporated in Singapore. The RLB Specialist Panel, with an aggregate of over 60 years of public-policy and industry experience, documents only confirmed hallucination findings, under a methodology that requires a verbatim regulator excerpt for every documented claim. All findings, citation IDs, model outputs, regulator excerpts, and methodology notes are open-access.

Primary source verified: OECD/LEGAL/0333, Recommendation of the Council on Merger Review (2025 Revision) · Substrate documents: R1-REGULATION-00001 · OECD portal: oecd.org/legal

Citation IDs referenced:

• RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q004-Sonnet46