What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Legal Norm | Proposed amended complaint asserted fictitious provisions of a purported North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act (ITPA); the court identified these statutory provisions as fabricated and tied them to likely AI drafting. || Fabricated: Case Law | Second proposed amended complaint contained fabricated case citations; the court found the inclusion of fabricated citations constituted bad faith and a basis to deny leave to amend.

Details

The court found the plaintiff's proposed amended complaints included fabricated legal authorities — including fictitious provisions of a purported North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act and other fabricated citations — and concluded the filings were likely drafted with AI. The court denied leave to amend as futile and constituted bad faith due to the fabricated citations, and granted defendant's motion to dismiss.

Sanction teardown · E.D. North Carolina, USA · 2026-03-26

Curry v. Capital One Auto Finance

What happened

In E.D. North Carolina, 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:

Fabricated (Legal Norm)

Proposed amended complaint asserted fictitious provisions of a purported North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act (ITPA); the court identified these statutory provisions as fabricated and tied them to likely AI drafting.
Fabricated (Case Law)

Second proposed amended complaint contained fabricated case citations; the court found the inclusion of fabricated citations constituted bad faith and a basis to deny leave to amend.

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

Leave to amend denied

Additional detail

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/1918/Curry_v._Capital_One_Finance_USA_26_March_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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