Skip to main content
NOPE
Low reported severity

Argentina: appellate chamber annuls a robbery judgment and trial after the trial judge left a generative-AI chat phrase in the ruling

On 4 June 2025 a criminal judge in Esquel, Chubut province, convicted a defendant of simple robbery and imposed two years and six months of effective imprisonment. On 15 October 2025 the Penal Chamber of Esquel annulled the judgment and the trial, ordering a new trial before another judge. The chamber found that the ruling contained a pasted phrase from a generative-AI assistant (“Aquí tienes el punto IV reeditado, sin citas y listo para copiar y pegar”), that the AI had been used on the rulings on the nullity of two essential pieces of evidence, and that the judge had not exercised human supervision or recorded the use. Perfil's headline describes the assistant as ChatGPT and La Nación's text as presumably ChatGPT; the quoted ruling and the prosecution office statement refer only to a generative-AI assistant. The chamber referred the judge's conduct to the Chubut Superior Court of Justice for ethical and disciplinary review.

AI system
ChatGPT (reported)
Occurred
4 Jun 2025 to 15 Oct 2025
Reported
16 October 2025
Event location
Unknown
What the AI did
Made a decision about the person
Reported harm
Legal Harm
Whose AI use
An institution’s AI use
Setting
Justice
Evidence
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account
5 claims: 5 reported. 6 open questions
People reported harmed
Not reliably quantifiable from the sources

AI system as recorded: Generative AI assistant (reported as ChatGPT)

Reported harm

Per press reports of the appellate ruling, the trial and conviction were annulled because of the judge's undisclosed generative-AI use and the case must be tried again before another judge. The chamber described serious consequences of this for the parties, the public and the State. The effect on the defendant is not reported and the annulment may favour the defendant.

What remains unknown

  • The full text of the ruling was not read (the Errepar copy is gated), so all findings are as reported by three outlets that share the same underlying ruling.
  • The share of the judgment written by the assistant is unknown. The chamber said the pasted text leaves a gap too wide to tell.
  • The specific AI product is not established. No chat log was seen.
  • The annulment date of 15 October 2025 is derived from La Nación's 'el miércoles' (article of 17 October 2025) and the metadata of a gated Errepar ruling page; no cited article states the date.
  • The outcome of the Superior Court review and the date of the new trial are not reported in the sources read.
  • The defendant's own view of the annulment and any effect of the delay on the defendant or on other parties to the case is not reported.

What the evidence supports

AI involvement: supported. The appellate chamber, as quoted by three outlets, found a pasted chat phrase in the ruling and concluded that a generative-AI assistant was used. The chamber described delegation of the decision as probable. The product name ChatGPT is stated by one outlet as presumed and by another without qualification.

5 claims: 5 reported. What the statuses mean

Reported On 4 June 2025 a criminal judge in Esquel convicted a defendant of simple robbery and sentenced the defendant to two years and six months of effective imprisonment, and the Penal Chamber of Esquel later annulled that judgment.

Causal attribution. Sources give the annulment as the chamber's response to the judge's AI use.

Reported The judgment contained the phrase “Aquí tienes el punto IV reeditado, sin citas y listo para copiar y pegar”, which the chamber took to show generative-AI use, including on the rulings on the nullity of two essential pieces of evidence.

Causal attribution. The chamber's finding, as quoted in the press, connects the phrase to AI use. The full ruling text was not read.

  • lanacion.com.ar(opens in new tab) supports · Spanish
    Aquí tienes el punto IV reeditado, sin citas y listo para copiar y pegar
  • documento.errepar.com(opens in new tab) supports · Spanish
    el magistrado utilizó la IA generativa, ni más ni menos, que en un aspecto central de la resolución en crisis como es la resolución de las nulidades de dos pruebas esenciales en el proceso
  • perfil.com(opens in new tab) supports · Spanish
    el juez de primera instancia incluyó accidentalmente una frase que revela el uso de un asistente de Inteligencia Artificial (IA) generativa
Reported The chamber annulled the judgment and the preceding trial and ordered a new trial before another judge, and barred the prosecution from showing at the new trial the videos omitted at the first.

Causal attribution. The annulment is attributed by the chamber to the judge's undisclosed and unsupervised AI use, which the chamber said prevented control of the judge's reasoning.

Reported The chamber referred the matter to the Chubut Superior Court of Justice to investigate the judge's conduct and said the judge may have breached that court's confidentiality rules by including the names of parties, witnesses and experts in the text processed by the assistant.

Causal attribution. The confidentiality point is the chamber's stated possibility and was not established as fact.

  • lanacion.com.ar(opens in new tab) supports · Spanish
    remitir las actuaciones al Superior Tribunal de Justicia de Chubut (STJ), que deberá investigar el alcance ético y disciplinario de la conducta
  • perfil.com(opens in new tab) supports · Spanish
    pudo haber incumplido los recaudos de confidencialidad exigidos por el Acuerdo Plenario N° 5435 del STJ, al incluir nombres de las partes, testigos y peritos en el texto procesado por el asistente
Reported Press coverage identifies the assistant as ChatGPT (La Nación as presumed, Perfil without qualification).

Causal attribution. The ruling as quoted refers to a generative-AI assistant. The product name comes from the press.

Sources

3 sources inspected, from 1 underlying account. Sources that repeat one account do not corroborate each other.

How the sources were read, and where the events happened

Full body read in the original Spanish (17 October 2025) by the reviewing agent without a human translator. Reports the appellate ruling; whether the journalist saw the ruling text is not stated. Applies to s1.

Article body is embedded in the page data and was decoded into bodies/gh-4-body.txt (16 October 2025). Read in Spanish without a human translator. It quotes the ruling. The linked full text of the ruling (documento.errepar.com/jurisprudencia/...) is gated and was not read. Applies to s2.

Full body read in Spanish (17 October 2025) without a human translator. It relays a statement of the Ministerio Publico Fiscal of Chubut and quotes the ruling. Applies to s3.

Event countries: Unknown. Affected-person countries: Unknown. Court countries: Argentina.

The court is the Penal Chamber of Esquel in Chubut province, and La Nación calls the ground for the annulment unprecedented in Argentine justice. The defendant's residence and where the judge used the assistant are not stated.

Reviewed for publication 2026-09-29: Three Spanish-language outlets report the same appellate ruling, which annulled a criminal judgment and trial after a pasted assistant phrase exposed undisclosed generative-AI use. The chamber's stated consequences for the parties (annulment and a repeated trial) are reported, and the effect on the defendant is not. The outlets share one reporting chain, so claims are attributed.

People reported harmed in this case

Not reliably quantifiable from the sources

The chamber refers to serious consequences of the annulment for 'los justiciables' (the parties to the proceeding), the public and the State without a count. No inspected source reports harm to the defendant specifically, and annulment of a conviction may be favourable to the defendant.

Counted once within this case. The same person may appear in other cases. This count does not establish AI causation.

Cite this case

Compiled per our published methodology: verification statuses, sourcing standards, and corrections process.

APA

NOPE. (2026). Argentina: appellate chamber annuls a robbery judgment and trial after the trial judge left a generative-AI chat phrase in the ruling. AI incidents. https://nope.net/incidents/2025-ar-esquel-criminal-judgment-annulled-judge-generative-ai-draft

BibTeX

@misc{2025_ar_esquel_criminal_judgment_annulled_judge_generative_ai_draft,
  title = {Argentina: appellate chamber annuls a robbery judgment and trial after the trial judge left a generative-AI chat phrase in the ruling},
  author = {NOPE},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {AI incidents},
  url = {https://nope.net/incidents/2025-ar-esquel-criminal-judgment-annulled-judge-generative-ai-draft}
}

Related cases

Low ChatGPT

Stephens County, Oklahoma: according to the district attorney, Judge Lawrence Wheeler told state investigators that a November 2025 order in a paternity and custody case, which denied a parent's request for a psychological evaluation and reprimanded that parent's attorney, cited at least two nonexistent cases produced by ChatGPT; the order was vacated after the attorney challenged it

In November 2025 Stephens County Associate District Judge Lawrence Wheeler issued an order in a child paternity and custody case that denied one parent's request for a psychological evaluation of the other parent and reprimanded the requesting parent's attorney 'for stooping to such frivolous trial tactics'. The attorney challenged the order at the Oklahoma Supreme Court in February 2026, telling the justices that it relied on two cases that do not exist; the challenge was dismissed in March after Wheeler vacated the order, and he is no longer on the case. According to a 17 August 2026 letter from the Stephens County district attorney, Wheeler told the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation that he used ChatGPT for research and wrote the order himself, and that at least two citations in it produced by ChatGPT do not exist. The mother in the case told News 9 that learning the order's citations were allegedly fabricated was alarming because it concerned the custody of a child. The attorney general's office declined criminal prosecution; judicial discipline remains possible.

Medium ChatGPT

New Mexico Supreme Court fines attorney Stephen Aarons $5,000 and removes him from a murder appeal over ChatGPT-fabricated testimony

Santa Fe defense attorney Stephen Aarons used ChatGPT (OpenAI's o3) on a Rev.com transcript and the record to draft briefing in the murder appeal of Oscar Renee Sandoval; the brief contained fabricated witnesses and testimony (including police officers 'Michelle Amarillo' and 'Sanchez' and invented testimony attributed to real people) and misdescribed real precedents. After a 21 August 2026 show-cause hearing at which Aarons admitted he had not verified the output, the New Mexico Supreme Court's written order of 9 September 2026 held him in direct contempt, fined him $5,000 payable to the State Bar Client Protection Fund within 30 days, removed him from the case, barred him from appearing before the court pending a disciplinary-board referral, struck the filed briefs and reassigned the appeal to the public defender.

Low ChatGPT (reported)

Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia: a working-holiday miner who, his lawyer said, came to believe from ChatGPT research that he had been illegally evicted from a caravan park threatened the park's owner and was fined A$1,000

A 21-year-old French national working as an underground miner in Kalgoorlie-Boulder on a working holiday visa pleaded guilty in Kalgoorlie Magistrates Court to making a threat to unlawfully do an act. The prosecutor said he saw the owner of the caravan park where he had stayed in a supermarket, waited outside, called him over for a fight in the car park and, when the owner declined, told him 'I really want to f… you up' and 'if I see you, I'll f… you up'. The owner and his wife drove to Kalgoorlie police station to report it. His defence lawyer told the court that he had been locked out of the park without his belongings, had done research using ChatGPT and came to believe that he had been unfairly and illegally evicted. The magistrate called the behaviour 'absolutely appalling', fined him A$1,000 and granted a spent conviction. The court was told the matter could make his application for permanent residency in Australia difficult. ChatGPT's replies are not published, and the AI connection rests on the defence submission as reported by one newsroom.

Critical ChatGPT

Acton Double Homicide (Arjun Aravind ChatGPT Family-Killing Stories)

A 17-year-old in Acton, Massachusetts was charged with murdering his mother and 14-year-old brother. Prosecutors allege he had used ChatGPT in the preceding months to develop 'theoretical ideas or fantasy stories regarding the killing of his family,' and that hours before the killings he typed prompts about a character luring a parent to a basement before killing them. His mother was found dead in the basement.

If you or someone you know is struggling, free and confidential support is available. Find a helpline near you at Signpost.

Back to all incidents