Sanction teardown · SST (Appeal Div), Canada · 2026-03-17
PL v Minister of Employment and Social Development
What happened
In SST (Appeal Div), 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)Tribunal could not locate the decision cited as 'NS (AD7-4)'; treated as an inaccurate/non-existent citation.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Tribunal could not locate the decision cited as 'AR (AD7-4)'; treated as an inaccurate/non-existent citation.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Tribunal could not locate the decision cited as 'Smith (GD15-4)'; citation found to be inaccurate or non-existent.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Tribunal could not locate the decision cited as 'Miller (GD15-5)'; citation found to be inaccurate or non-existent.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Tribunal could not locate the decision cited as 'Oberle (GD18-13)'; citation found to be inaccurate or non-existent.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Tribunal could not locate a reported decision called 'Mazziotto' referenced at AD7-12 and treated it as non-existent.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Tribunal noted familiarity with a different 'Klabouch' decision but could locate no reported decision matching the Claimant's citation at AD7-12; citation considered incorrect.
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.
Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate
Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2221/PL-v-Minister-of-Employment-and-Social-Development-2026-SST-248.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).