Sanction teardown · D. New Mexico, USA · 2026-05-07
Danielle L. Neri v. Board of Education for Albuquerque Public Schools
What happened
In D. New Mexico, USA, a filing relied on Centient AI to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:
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Fabricated (Case Law)Plaintiff cited a nonexistent Tenth Circuit case 'United States v. Stone, 988 F.2d 1056, 1061 (10th Cir. 1993)'; Court found the citation fabricated and noted the correct existing case was Hall v. Western Production Co., 988 F.2d 1050 (10th Cir. 1993).
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Fabricated (Exhibits & Submissions)Doc. 255 contained multiple legal citations formatted as hyperlinks to Centient AI; Court noted these bore marks of artificial intelligence and cautioned they may produce fabricated or misleading authorities.
Which AI tool
Centient AI. 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
Warning
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/2129/Neri_v_Albuquerque_Public_Schools_et_USA_7_May_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).