Compiled by Citation Safe (Digital Empire Holdings LLC) from the court’s published sanction order (decided August 13, 2026). Quotes and case details come from the order itself — check the primary source before relying on them.

Sanction teardown · TJ San Paulo, Brazil · 2026-08-13

Apelação Cível nº 1032884-04.2025.8.26.0224

What happened

In TJ San Paulo, Brazil, a filing relied on an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Attorney cited non-existent judicial precedents produced by an AI tool in the initial petition; court treated the citations as fabricated case law and relied on that finding to recognize litigância de má-fé.

Which AI tool

an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.

Outcome

Monetary Fine; Bar Referral (monetary penalty: 1 BRL.)

Additional detail

The court determined that the author's attorney used an AI tool without critical review to generate and cite non-existent jurisprudential precedents in the initial petition. The conduct was held to constitute litigância de má-fé; the court imposed a procedural fine (2% of the updated value of the cause) and ordered that the decision be forwarded to the OAB for possible professional measures, reasoning that using AI to fabricate authorities undermines the integrity of the judicial debate and violates duties of probity and good faith.

How Citation Safe would have caught this

Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.

Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2848/20260000779792.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).