Sanction teardown · Canadian IPO, Canada · 2026-02-17
14095863 Canada Inc. v Abercrombie & Fitch Trading Co.
What happened
In Canadian IPO, Canada, 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:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Registrar identified multiple cited cases that do not appear to exist in the Requesting Party's written representations and flagged them as fabricated; Registrar noted these appeared across several paragraphs and undermined the submissions.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Registrar found several purported quotations in paras 71–75 that appear to be completely fabricated and thus not attributable to any real authority; Registrar treated them as fabricated quotations undermining the submission's reliability.
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Misrepresented (Legal Norm)Registrar noted inaccurate quotations/misquotations of the Trademarks Act (inserting 'and services' where only 'goods' appeared) and misquotations of case law in multiple paragraphs; these misrepresentations were identified and criticized.
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Misrepresented (Exhibits & Submissions)Registrar observed references to non-existent exhibits and allegations that the Owner fabricated portions of its evidence; Registrar rejected these assertions as baseless given the Requesting Party's own fabricated citations and quotations.
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
Not specified in source record.
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.
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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/1706/14095863-Canada-Inc.-v-Abercrombie-Fitch-Trading-Co.-2026-TMOB-28-compressed.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).