Former Fox News host Andrea Tantaros, suing pro se, cited non-existent statutory language from the VGMVPL and multiple non-existent cases in her Fox News employment litigation. SDNY inferred AI tool use, struck her unauthorized sur-reply, and warned that future AI citation violations may result in s
A Nevada federal court dismissed a pro se plaintiff’s case with prejudice after he repeatedly submitted filings containing misrepresented and non-existent case law — even after multiple explicit Rule 11 warnings and the threat of case-dispositive sanctions. The court found no satisfactory explanatio
A Wisconsin federal court sanctioned attorney Paul Wilkins $1,000 after he used the Claude AI platform to draft a brief, had a law clerk find hallucinated quotations, then trusted Claude to correct them — without human review — resulting in new fabrications being filed.
A North Carolina federal court dismissed a pro se plaintiff’s FCRA case and denied leave to amend after her AI-generated briefs cited fictitious provisions of the North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act and contained fabricated case citations — even after the court had already warned her it wou
Maine federal judge imposed non-monetary sanctions on attorney Kelly Guagenty after she used Claude or ChatGPT to generate case citations that were fabricated, then filed a Notice of Errata that introduced additional inaccuracies. The sanction focused on education: attending AI CLE, creating firm AI
In a Florida family law certiorari petition filed by a pro se litigant, the appellate court found that only 4 of 13 cited cases both existed and stood for the propositions asserted. Five cases were entirely fabricated; four real cases were cited for propositions they do not support. The court issued
Chief Judge Kendall sanctioned a pro se plaintiff $5,000 after finding 30+ AI hallucinations across two filings — including 13 in a single Rule 59(e) motion and a fabrication of language attributed to the court’s own prior order that the judge never wrote. The court’s grace had been exhausted.
The Sixth Circuit removed a CJA-appointed attorney from a criminal appeal after discovering his briefs — drafted using Westlaw’s CoCounsel AI — contained three fabricated quotations attributed to real cases. The attorney is denied CJA compensation, referred for bar discipline, and replaced. A landma
In a striking reversal of the typical AI hallucination pattern, Maryland’s Appellate Court published a custody/SIJS opinion that itself contains citation references that are incorrect or do not exist — preserved in the record because they appear in the official court opinion. This case represents th
A pro se plaintiff who used AI to draft a sanctions motion against a school district — without verifying the citations — was himself hit with $7,032 in sanctions when multiple fabricated citations were found in his filing, despite his completion of a Johns Hopkins AI ethics course.