Sanction teardown · CBCA, USA · 2025-10-07
In the Matter of Stephen C.
What happened
In CBCA, 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:
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Fabricated (Legal Norm)Claimant cited several inapplicable/unspecified regulations to support reimbursement; when asked to provide the text he admitted the citations were generated by AI and withdrew reliance on them (retaining only JTR 053710).
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
Claim denied; reimbursement of moving costs denied.
Additional detail
Claimant cited several inapplicable regulations to support reimbursement. When directed to supply the texts, claimant admitted he had used artificial intelligence to create his submission and withdrew reliance on the cited regulations except for JTR 053710. The Board denied the claim.
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/1436/GOODMAN_10-07-25_8461-RELO__STEPHEN_C_DECISION.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).