This puts the burden to make sure it's right on the submitter, where it should be. Verification can come at any time after that; the submitter understands the consequences of hallucinated references. Verification can be crowd-sourced (and likely will be).

Nothing stops someone from putting a PDF on the internet. I'm fine with ArXiv holding a high standard.

> ArXiv doesn't even check the submission closely, so how can they know?

They can be informed by people who read the papers and check the citations. A zero-tolerance policy provides an incentive to report sloppy papers (namely, that you can be confident something will be done about it), and each time a paper is removed or an author is banned, it incrementally increases the value of the arXiv as a whole.

> Being required to publish in a peer reviewed journal will close off arxiv for many researchers for good.

At the end of the day, demanding that people carefully proofread their LLM-generated papers before sharing them on the arXiv seems like a relative low bar to clear, and I sort of question whether it's reasonable to call individuals who find it too onerous "researchers" in the first place.

You could at least filter out hallucinated references which simply don't exist pretty trivially, I'd imagine.

You don't need to be actively enforcing a rule 100% on everyone. Speed cameras don't cover every stretch of road either.

It's enough for them to place this policy and enforce it when they become aware of violations. Someone reading the slopped paper (or, here, trying to follow a reference) will notice sooner or later.

> Being required to publish in a peer reviewed journal will close off arxiv for many researchers for good. It also defeats the point of it being a pre-print.

You sound like it's impossible for researchers to write papers without slopped references, and inevitable to get hit by this policy.