CPI-U figure invention, statutory threshold misstatement, and Source Credit fabrication in CFTC Reg 4.7 (2024 QEP Amendments). Two frontier AI models tested by the RegLeg Brief Specialist Panel produced confident, citable answers across 17 distinct questions on the September 2024 amendments to CFTC Regulation 4.7 that the regulator's own primary text directly contradicts. The audit covers statutory threshold reproduction, NPRM-stage and final-rule CPI-U buying-power figure quotation, Commission voting-record reproduction, Federal Register correction-record reproduction, and Source Credit reproduction.
For finance teams at management & risk consulting firms, the failure pattern is operationally consequential. The audit tested 17 questions designed by the RLB Specialist Panel to mirror how lawyers, compliance officers, fund administrators, financial advisers, and management consultants actually use AI on this practice area: drafting memos, populating registers, preparing testimony exhibits, drafting client deliverables, and verifying statutory and Federal Register citations. Each question is bound to verbatim regulator-issued primary substrate.
Across the 17 findings the AI subjects invented NPRM-stage and final-rule CPI-U buying-power figures, misstated 7 USC 1a(18)(B)(ii)(I) thresholds by factors of forty and two hundred, misattributed the Commission's vote (naming a commissioner who had departed two years earlier), reported a Federal Register correction as applying to two extra CFR Parts that the index does not list, and misstated the 7 USC 6n Source Credit, the 7 USC 6n(3)(A) recordkeeping retention period, and the 7 USC 6n(2) registration expiration date.
The findings are operationally consequential for fund-formation lawyers, CPO/CTA compliance teams, fund administrators, financial advisers, and management-consulting firms whose practice touches the September 2024 amendments. A partner-level legal memorandum that recites an ECP threshold of $5,000,000 or $25,000,000 where the statute records $1,000,000,000 misstates a counterparty-eligibility threshold by a factor of two hundred or forty. A CCO briefing memo that quotes an invented CPI-U buying-power figure as a verbatim regulator quotation embeds a falsifiable error into a board-level deliverable.
A fund administrator's annual rule-change tracker that records the December 2024 correction as applying to 17 CFR Parts 37, 38, and 40 (instead of Part 40 alone) populates the firm's effective-date register with operational data the published index does not support.
The audit's 17 findings are published with immutable RLB Citation IDs. Representative entries include RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q024-Opus47, RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q024-Sonnet46, RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q011-Sonnet46, RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q016-Opus47, RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q008-Sonnet46, and RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q017-Opus47, RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q027-Sonnet46, RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q029-Sonnet46, RLB-H-US-CFTC-CPO-CTA-REGULATION-4-7-QEP-THRESHOLDS-2024-Q031-Opus47. The full audit is published at the CFTC Regulation 4.7 (2024 QEP Amendments) hub on RegLegBrief.com.
This is the consolidated view of findings. Click the Citation IDs or 'see details →' on any item for the full details for each finding.
For finance teams at management & risk consulting firms working on CFTC Regulation 4.7 matters, the AI's stated answer reads as a verbatim quotation that staff would paste into a register entry, memo, or client deliverable before verification against the source. The regulator's own text records a different position. The NPRM pre-print PDF records, using CPI-U data as of February 2023, that the $2,000,000 threshold in the Securities Portfolio Test has the same buying power as approximately $4,270,000, and the $200,000 threshold in the Initial Margin and Premiums Test has the same buying power as approximately $427,000.
Sonnet 4.6 reported $4,070,000 and $407,000 for the same reference month. The 5 percent gap between the AI's figures and the regulator's stated figures cannot be reconciled to any CPI-U release; the answer is invented under the appearance of a precise quotation. For the finance teams at management & risk consulting firms working this question into an internal compliance, legal, operations, or risk record, the AI's stated answer would embed an error into the working record that downstream reviewers treat as verified.
For finance teams at management & risk consulting firms working on CFTC Regulation 4.7 matters, the AI's stated answer reads as a verbatim quotation that staff would paste into a register entry, memo, or client deliverable before verification against the source. The regulator's own text records a different position. The final-rule pre-print records, using CPI-U data as of July 2024, that the $2,000,000 threshold has the same buying power as approximately $4,464,726, and the $200,000 threshold has the same buying power as approximately $446,472. Opus 4.7 reported $4,464,200 and $446,420 in response to a direct verbatim-quotation request.
The figures are close but not identical to the regulator's text; the difference indicates the model produced a near-extrapolation rather than retrieving the source figure. For the finance teams at management & risk consulting firms working this question into an internal compliance, legal, operations, or risk record, the AI's stated answer would embed an error into the working record that downstream reviewers treat as verified.
For finance teams at management & risk consulting firms working on CFTC Regulation 4.7 matters, the AI's stated answer reads as a verbatim quotation that staff would paste into a register entry, memo, or client deliverable before verification against the source. The regulator's own text records a different position. The final-rule pre-print updates the inflation analysis to a July 2024 reference month and records $4,464,726 and $446,472 as the buying-power equivalents. Sonnet 4.6 reported $4,270,000 and $427,000 for the July 2024 reference, which are the figures from the NPRM stage at February 2023.
The model substituted the NPRM-era figures for the final-rule figures, presenting them as the July 2024 buying-power equivalents. For the finance teams at management & risk consulting firms working this question into an internal compliance, legal, operations, or risk record, the AI's stated answer would embed an error into the working record that downstream reviewers treat as verified.
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.