No fabricated references or citations

When an AI generates clickable hyperlinks in its response and no guardrail prohibits invented citations, users will click fabricated URLs — routing them to domains that may be squatted, adversarial, or simply nonexistent. For research or knowledge applications, invented paper citations and statistics erode user trust and can cause real-world harm if acted on (medical guidance, legal information, financial claims). OWASP LLM09 explicitly identifies misinformation propagation as an LLM risk. The combination of markdown link rendering and no anti-fabrication instruction in the system prompt is the highest-risk configuration in this category.

Add an explicit anti-fabrication instruction to your system prompt and disable or validate AI-generated links in the renderer:

const systemPrompt = `
Do not cite, link to, or reference any external source, URL, paper, or statistic
unless it was explicitly provided to you in the conversation context.
If asked for sources you do not have, say: "I don't have a specific source — please verify independently."
`

If you render AI output with react-markdown, pass a custom a component that either strips href values on AI-generated links or routes them through a domain-validation step before rendering.