Compiled by Citation Safe (Digital Empire Holdings LLC) from the court’s published sanction order (decided September 24, 2026). Quotes and case details come from the order itself — check the primary source before relying on them.

Sanction teardown · Supreme Court of California, USA · 2026-09-24

Cervantes v. Bianco

What happened

In Supreme Court of California, USA, 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:

Misrepresented (Case Law)

Counsel used misquoted passages from Common Cause and inaccurately recited the case’s holding in support of the Sheriff’s standing argument; the firm later apologized and withdrew the argument.

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

The court disapproved the improper use of artificial intelligence, reminded counsel of professional duties of competence and candor, and referred the matter to the State Bar to determine whether discipline was warranted.

Additional detail

In preliminary briefing, counsel for Sheriff Bianco relied on misquoted passages from and an incorrect statement of the holding in Common Cause v. Board of Supervisors. The law firm apologized and withdrew the standing argument, and the court stated that artificial intelligence tools apparently contributed to the significant error. The court disapproved the use of AI in this manner, emphasized counsel’s duties of competence and candor, and referred the matter to the California State Bar; no professional discipline or monetary penalty had yet been imposed.

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/3165/Cervantes_v._Bianco_USA_24_September_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).