Legal teams at mainboard and premium-listed issuers approaching announceable transactions that engage the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation are increasingly using AI to draft board memos on merger-clearance exposure, generate disclosure-committee briefings on the operative-section structure, and validate Section-level citation language in announcement documents and regulator-facing engagement papers.
The RLB Specialist Panel put a set of practitioner-grade questions on the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation to two frontier AI models with web search active. Each question is prepared by the Panel based on the workflows that legal teams at mainboard and premium-listed issuers actually use AI for under the OECD's 2025 revision of the Recommendation of the Council on Merger Review (OECD/LEGAL/0333). The Panel then binds every AI response to verbatim regulator-issued source text held as primary substrate.
On the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, the AI subjects returned two hallucinated answers for legal teams at mainboard and premium-listed issuers, in the form of Structure Inflation.
For legal teams at mainboard and premium-listed issuers advising on cross-border merger transactions touching the 2025 OECD Merger Review Recommendation, citation accuracy on the operative architecture, on Section IV.3 remedies hierarchy, and on Section III.11.b failing firm defence is load-bearing in every authority-facing submission, every board memo, and every transactional document. A counterparty or competition authority who identifies a structural inflation, a misattributed sub-hierarchy, or a closed-cumulative-test framing on first reading calls the entire piece of advice into question.
The structural-architecture failure is the most directly visible: a board memo or regulator-facing submission that lists 'international co-operation' or 'monitoring' as operative RECOMMENDS sections is wrong on first reading. The Section IV.3 EU sub-hierarchy import is the most insidious failure, reading as authoritative because the EU framework is real, but presenting EU practice as OECD content imports the wrong normative baseline into the firm's remedy strategy.
The published Specialist Panel findings carry the following citation identifiers:
RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q001-Opus47 (Invented cross-border cooperation section; Section V dropped)RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q001-Sonnet46 (Invented cross-border cooperation section; Section V dropped)RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-MERGER-REVIEW-RECOMMENDATION-2025-Q006-Opus47 (Phantom transnational cooperation operative clause; ex-post assessment omitted)This is the consolidated view of findings. Click the Citation IDs or 'see details →' on any item for the full details for each finding.
Two AI tools produced a six-section structural account of the 2025 Recommendation that inserted 'International Co-operation' and 'Monitoring' as standalone operative RECOMMENDS clauses and omitted Section V, ex-post assessment of merger decisions and remedies, entirely. A legal team at a mainboard issuer that uses this account to draft internal M&A policy or a board-level regulatory mapping document produces a governance framework calibrated to a phantom architecture: one operative section that does not exist, and a missing obligation that does.
The deliverable will not flag that adherent-state authorities can revisit completed transactions under Section V, leaving the firm without the post-closing risk tracking that the 2025 revision requires. Because the AI's account was internally coherent and thematically plausible, the error will survive internal review unless a lawyer independently verifies OECD/LEGAL/0333.
An AI tool characterised the 2025 Recommendation as containing 'Transnational Co-operation' as operative section (v) and 'Monitoring' as section (vi), omitting the actual Section V on ex-post assessment and presenting a six-section structure rather than the correct five. For a legal team preparing jurisdictional analysis or merger control training materials for a transaction team, the error is not cosmetic: the firm's internal framework will describe the OECD standard incorrectly to the lawyers relying on it, and will fail to include ex-post assessment as a live operative commitment under the 2025 revision.
When challenged, the AI acknowledged uncertainty rather than correcting to the accurate structure, meaning reliance on a follow-up prompt to self-correct is not a reliable safeguard for this instrument.
Every finding on this page compares an AI subject's account of the rule against the regulator's verbatim text from the regulator's own portal. Both are linked. Each delta, its root causes, and impact analysis are documented and published with immutable Citation IDs.