Sanction teardown · WSIAT, Canada · 2026-04-07
Decision No. 353/24R
What happened
In WSIAT, 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)Representative cited 'Robert v. WSIAT' as an Ontario appellate authority; Tribunal found no record of the decision and determined it does not appear to exist, so it could not be considered.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Representative cited 'Curtis v. WSIAT' purportedly as an appellate authority; Tribunal found the citation incomplete and the decision does not appear to exist and therefore could not be relied upon.
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Fabricated (Legal Norm)Representative referenced a 'section 5.5' under the HRTO/HRC; Tribunal reviewed the Human Rights Code and found no such section exists and therefore could not consider the reference.
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
Admonishment
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/2315/Decision-No.-353-24R-2026-ONWSIAT-374.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).