Makel v. Cheney: Court Strikes AI-Generated Brief Citing Phantom Precedents | Advocate Prakhar

Case at a Glance

Full Citation	Makel v. Cheney, U.S. Federal Court, April 23, 2026
Court	U.S. Federal District Court
Date	23 April 2026
Category	AI Hallucination & Rule 11 Sanctions
Jurisdiction	USA
AI Tool Used	Generative AI (unspecified)
Outcome	Brief stricken; show cause order on Rule 11 sanctions issued

Background

Plaintiff Makel opposed a motion in federal proceedings against defendant Cheney. The opposition brief included legal citations that opposing counsel identified as non-existent. Makel’s filing bore the hallmarks of AI-generated content submitted without verification — a pattern courts across the United States have increasingly encountered since 2023. The court struck the brief and directed the filer to show cause why Rule 11 sanctions should not be imposed.

The AI Issue

Generative AI models produce citations that sound authoritative and plausible but are statistically composed rather than researched — they predict what a case citation would look like rather than retrieving one that exists. In Makel v. Cheney, the cited cases could not be located in any legal database, indicating hallucination. The court emphasised that FRCP Rule 11(b)(2) requires the signing attorney to certify that legal contentions are warranted by existing law — a certification that is false when citations are fabricated.

What the Court Decided

• The brief was stricken from the record as containing false citations [inherent power to manage proceedings].
• A show cause order was issued requiring the filer to explain why Rule 11 sanctions should not be imposed [FRCP Rule 11(c)].
• Ignorance of AI hallucination tendency does not constitute a defence to Rule 11 certification obligations [objective reasonableness standard].
• The attorney’s personal signature on the filing creates non-delegable personal accountability for citation accuracy [Rule 11(b)].

“The attorney’s signature on a brief is a personal certification that citations are grounded in existing law. AI does not sign briefs — attorneys do, and they are responsible for what they sign.”

— Makel v. Cheney, U.S. Federal Court, April 23, 2026

The India Angle

Indian Law Equivalent

India’s equivalent of Rule 11 obligations is found in the verification requirements under Order VI Rule 15 and 15A CPC and the advocate’s duty under the Advocates Act, 1961. The court’s inherent powers under Section 151 CPC permit striking of pleadings containing false representations. The Contempt of Courts Act, 1971 covers deliberate submission of false material to courts.

Bar Council Rules

Under Bar Council of India Rules, Part VI, Chapter II, Section II, Rules 1 and 2, advocates must act in good faith and must not misrepresent the law. Filing AI-hallucinated citations without verification constitutes a direct violation of these professional duties and may attract proceedings under Section 35 of the Advocates Act, 1961.

Practical Advice for Indian Advocates

• Treat every AI-generated citation as unverified until independently confirmed on SCC Online, Manupatra, or Indian Kanoon — no exceptions for tight deadlines.
• Build a pre-filing checklist that includes explicit citation verification steps, with a named advocate responsible for sign-off on AI-assisted briefs.
• When opponents cite cases you cannot locate, raise the issue formally and promptly — courts appreciate vigilance and it may reveal sanctionable AI hallucination by the other side.

Quick Takeaways

• Courts will strike AI-hallucinated briefs from the record, not merely note the error for future proceedings.
• Rule 11’s objective standard means an honest belief in AI accuracy is not a defence — the attorney must verify independently.
• Show cause orders for sanctions create reputational and financial risk that dwarfs any time saved by unverified AI research.

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Deep Dive: Rule 11 as AI Accountability Tool

The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were not designed with AI hallucinations in mind, but Rule 11 has proven to be the most powerful existing mechanism for addressing them. Rule 11(b)(2) requires that an attorney certify, by signing a pleading or brief, that the legal contentions therein are “warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law.” A citation to a case that does not exist is categorically incapable of satisfying this standard — the certification is false as a matter of law, regardless of the attorney’s subjective belief.

What makes Makel v. Cheney and its peer cases distinctive from mere careless citation errors is the pattern they reflect: AI systems generate fictitious citations because they are designed to produce statistically plausible sequences of text, not to retrieve verified information. The citation “looks right” because it follows the format of real citations — a party name, a court, a year, a reporter — but has no underlying case associated with it. The attorney who reviews such a citation without checking whether it actually exists has failed to perform the basic professional function that distinguishes legal practice from legal information retrieval.

Comparing Makel to the landmark Mata v. Avianca (2023) reveals an evolution in judicial response. In Mata, Judge Castel expressed some surprise and focused on education alongside sanction. By 2026, courts imposing Rule 11 sanctions for AI hallucinations are doing so in an environment where the risk is universally known — Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1, the ABA Formal Opinion 512, UK SRA guidance, and dozens of widely-covered cases have made AI hallucination a mainstream professional risk topic. The 2026 wave of sanctions is therefore less forgiving than Mata, because courts can fairly expect practitioners to have established verification protocols by now.

For Indian advocates, Rule 11’s conceptual framework maps onto the professional duties imposed by the Advocates Act and BCI Rules. The principle is the same: a lawyer’s signature on a court document is a professional representation, not merely an administrative formality. If AI-generated content sits behind that signature without verification, the integrity of the professional representation is compromised. Indian courts have inherent powers to act on such compromises — the question is whether they will develop systematic responses, as US courts have done, or address AI hallucinations on an ad hoc basis as cases present themselves.