Sanction teardown · High Court, Singapore · 2026-03-06
Tan Hai Peng Micheal and another v Tan Cheong Joo and others
What happened
In High Court, Singapore, 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)Case A was a non-existent authority created by pairing a genuine case name with the neutral citation of a different real case; the court noted that the name and citation were individually real but did not belong together, and the case did not support the asserted legal proposition.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Case B was entirely fictitious: neither its case name nor neutral citation corresponded to an existing case, and it did not support the legal proposition for which it was cited.
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
Monetary Sanction; No pass-through to clients (monetary penalty: 10000 SGD.)
Additional detail
Earlier decision in the same case here.
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/3070/2026_SGHC_49.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).