Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd. does not exist — a fabricated AI citation

“Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co., Ltd.” is the case that opened the modern era of AI-hallucination sanctions. It does not exist at 925 F.3d 1339 or anywhere else in the Eleventh Circuit's reporter. Steven Schwartz, an attorney representing Roberto Mata in a personal-injury suit against Avianca, used ChatGPT to research airline-liability precedent and pasted the chatbot's output — including this invented citation — directly into an opposition brief without opening a single underlying opinion.

When Avianca's lawyers said they could not find the case, Schwartz asked ChatGPT to confirm it was real; the chatbot insisted it was and even fabricated an excerpt of the (nonexistent) opinion. Judge P. Kevin Castel later wrote that the case included “bogus judicial decisions, with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,” naming Varghese first among the six fakes his opinion documents in detail.

Varghese is the citation most people mean when they invoke Mata v. Avianca as shorthand for the entire problem — it is the one most frequently repeated in law-review articles, CLE slide decks, and bar ethics opinions written since. If a brief or memo cites it, the citation was not independently verified before it was written.