7 May 2025 to 23 Jul 2025Event location unknownChatGPT
In an incarcerated man's lawsuit against Alabama prison officials in the US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, two motions filed in May 2025 for the defence of a former Alabama corrections commissioner contained five citations that did not exist or did not support the propositions cited. Lawyers of the Butler Snow firm, which the state retains to defend its prisons, told the court that a partner had obtained the citations from ChatGPT and had not verified them. On 23 July 2025 Judge Anna M. Manasco publicly reprimanded three of the firm's lawyers, disqualified them from the case and referred the matter to the Alabama State Bar, and ordered them to give the order to clients, opposing counsel and judges in all their pending cases. She declined to suspend them and released the firm and two other lawyers without sanction.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 15/10/2026
Event date unknownUnited KingdomUnidentified chatbot
Derbyshire Police said in June 2026 that it had launched a criminal investigation into an allegation of perverting the course of justice after the alleged use of AI systems by an officer to create evidential material in a number of cases, and that the officer had been removed from frontline duties; no arrests had been made. The Crown Prosecution Service said it was engaging with defence teams and the courts in appropriate cases. Scottish Legal News, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that the detective allegedly used an AI chatbot to prepare documents including victim impact statements and case summaries for prosecutors. It also reported that a number of rape convictions were being reviewed. In October 2026 the head of the Independent Office for Police Conduct referred to the case when warning that AI mistakes could lead to a mistrial. The officer is not named, the AI system is not identified, and the allegations have not been tested.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 3 underlying accounts · Added 14/10/2026
24 Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified AI research tool
On 24 April 2026 the Supreme Court of Alabama dismissed an appeal by two siblings in a family dispute over living trusts because their lawyer, W. Perry Hall, had filed briefs in which most of the legal authorities were misquoted or did not exist. The court said they appeared to be AI hallucinations, and at a show-cause hearing in February 2026 Hall admitted that many authorities did not exist and that he had improperly used AI to obtain them. The court ordered Hall to pay the opposing party's fees and costs of $17,200 and double appeal costs, barred him from filing in the court without a co-signing attorney and referred him to the Alabama State Bar. It said the dismissal was imposed as a sanction because of the particularly egregious facts. One justice, concurring in part and dissenting in part, objected to dismissing the appeal as a sanction for the lawyer's conduct but would have affirmed the judgment against the clients on the merits.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 14/10/2026
Event date unknownArgentinaChatGPT (reported)
Argentina's Gendarmería Nacional said on 13 October 2026 that its investigators in Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña, Chaco, under the direction of the federal prosecutor there, opened a criminal investigation after an alert from the US FBI. According to the release, the alert warned of a user in the town who, in consultations on ChatGPT, claimed to have weapons, explosives and ammunition and a detailed plan for a mass shooting at local educational establishments; the release's opening paragraph says the two people involved used ChatGPT to consult and obtain a specific plan for an attack. Gendarmes searched a home on a federal court order, seized notebooks with handwritten plans for the attack, bladed weapons and tools, a fuel can, a book with Nazi symbols, cash and computers, and detained two adults on the judge's order. Infobae, relaying the official information, reports that the target was a university in Corrientes. The accusations are allegations, and what ChatGPT replied is not reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/10/2026
Jun 2025Event location unknownLegal Genius (reported)
In an urgent application by Northbound Processing against the South African Diamond and Precious Metals Regulator, Acting Judge DJ Smit of the Gauteng High Court, Johannesburg, found while preparing judgment that two cases cited in the applicant's heads of argument did not exist. According to ITWeb, which saw the court documents, junior counsel first said a wrong version had been filed, a corrected version was found to contain two further incorrect citations, and on the court's direct inquiry junior counsel acknowledged that the citations likely originated from an AI tool called Legal Genius, used under deadline pressure. The judge accepted the legal team's apologies and found no intent to deceive, but referred the conduct of the applicant's legal practitioners to the Legal Practice Council for investigation (June 2025). The applicant obtained the relief it sought.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/10/2026
25 Feb 2025 to 7 Jul 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI drafting tool
In the defamation case Coomer v. Lindell in the US District Court for the District of Colorado, a brief that lawyers for Mike Lindell and MyPillow filed on 25 February 2025 contained nearly thirty defective citations, including citations of cases that do not exist. At a conference on 21 April 2025 lead counsel Christopher Kachouroff told Judge Nina Y. Wang that he had drafted the motion and then 'ran it through AI' and had not personally checked the citations. Counsel later said a wrong draft had been filed by mistake; the court was not persuaded. On 7 July 2025 the court found that he and co-counsel Jennifer DeMaster had violated Rule 11 and fined each $3,000 (Kachouroff jointly with his law firm). The court did not sanction Lindell or his companies.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 14/10/2026
3 Jun 2026United StatesUnidentified AI tool
On 3 June 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit fined immigration attorneys Mike Singh Sethi and William Rounds $2,500 each and suspended both from practice before the court for six months. Briefs filed in an asylum petition for review cited two cases that do not exist and attributed quotations to opinions that do not contain them. In a motion to correct, the attorneys called the errors typographical, and at oral argument Rounds twice said AI was not used. In their response to the court's order to show cause, they conceded that the errors were probably the product of unauthorised AI use by the firm's unlicensed brief writers and a failure to check citations. The court said the suspension was owed to their repeated failure of candour. The Board of Immigration Appeals then suspended Sethi from practice before the Board, the immigration courts and the Department of Homeland Security for six months, effective 13 June 2026, and designated that decision as a precedent on 1 October 2026.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 14/10/2026
1 Sept 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI drafting tool
In a pending appeal against a decision of Austria's data protection authority, the Federal Administrative Court (BVwG) found that the appellant had filed hundreds of pages of statements and attachments within less than four months that were obviously created exclusively with large-language-model text programs and not labelled as AI-generated. In a decision of 1 September 2026 the court imposed a EUR 200 penalty for wanton use of the court, holding that the AI-assisted filings repeated the same complaints, brought no new facts or evidence and ignored the EU labelling duty for AI-generated content. The court announced it as the first such penalty for AI submissions. The appellant is anonymised and the appellant's response is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 13/10/2026
Jun 2026BrazilUnidentified AI drafting tool
A judge of the 5th Mixed Court of Sousa, Paraíba, found hidden instructions aimed at artificial intelligence tools spread over seven pages of a lawyer's motion for clarification in a public-competition case in June 2026, including an order to ignore impartiality and a note calling it a test of whether the judge used only AI to decide. The judge fined the lawyer two penalties of R$16,400 (R$32,800 in total) for bad-faith litigation and contempt of the court's dignity, and referred the case to the Paraíba bar (OAB-PB) and the state prosecutors, G1 reports. The defence said the commands were not inserted deliberately and blamed an error in exporting a file prepared with AI support. An appeal judge refused to suspend the fines on 30 June, the trial judge kept them on reconsideration, and in July, G1 reports, the OAB-PB preventively suspended two lawyers after opening procedures into two hidden-command cases, one of them the Sousa case.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources · Added 13/10/2026
Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified AI drafting tool (suspected)
Goiânia city councillor Aava Santiago (PSB) told Brazil's National Council of Justice (CNJ) that the final text of a judgment of the Regional Electoral Court of Goiás (TRE-GO), which removed her from office for party infidelity, contained commands, instructions and review records indicating the use of artificial intelligence without the human supervision that CNJ Resolution 615/2025 requires. On 9 October 2026, the day a substitute took her seat, the national inspector of justice, Minister Benedito Gonçalves, found the allegations plausible on a preliminary reading, suspended the judgment and the administrative acts that followed from it, and gave the court 15 days to explain its review procedures, G1 and Jurinews report. The suspension does not review the merits of the removal, and whether AI was used irregularly has yet to be investigated.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources · Added 13/10/2026
2024United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool (suspected)
While campaigning in 2024 for a Broward County court seat, Lauren Peffer, now a county judge, sought the endorsement of the South Florida Sun Sentinel editorial board. Asked to back her claim of an image crisis in Florida's judiciary, she cited a self-published book by a fired employee of the Ninth Judicial Circuit and supplied a recording purportedly of a phone call about the book between Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz, Justice Renatha Francis and the circuit's chief judge, Lisa Munyon. The Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission's notice of formal charges, filed in May 2025, said the recording was fabricated, likely using computer manipulation or generative AI, and that while the voices resembled those of the participants, the manner of speech, tone and much of the content were objectively unrealistic. The notice said she had shared it despite clear evidence of its inauthenticity and had perpetuated a false perception of illegal, unethical or immoral conduct by the justices, a chief judge and others in the judicial branch. Peffer apologised, said the content was created by a third party with whom she had no ties, and testified that she could not explain why she had thought it valid. According to Bloomberg Law, the Florida Supreme Court on 9 October 2026 suspended her for 30 days and fined her $10,000, saying her conduct undermined public confidence in the judiciary by implicating sitting justices; the two justices whose voices were faked recused. Who made the recording, and with what tool, is not reported.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement suspected · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources · Added 12/10/2026
31 Jul 2023Event location unknownUnidentified AI video-analysis system
According to La Razón's account of a July 2024 judgment of the High Court of Justice of Asturias, Duro Felguera replaced the continuous on-site guarding provided by the contractor Protectum with a Securitas service that, from 1 August 2023, combined cameras with artificial intelligence for video analysis, roving patrols and alarm response. The guards of the outgoing contract were left out of the new one. Protectum ended a guard's employment on 31 July 2023. The court held that Securitas did not have to take him on because the new service was different, declared the dismissal unfair and ordered Protectum to pay him €30,672.72 in compensation plus processing wages. La Razón notes that human guards still intervened in the new service and that the presence of AI was part of the reorganisation without making the dismissal lawful.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026
15 Dec 2025 to 1 Oct 2026CanadaUnidentified AI drafting tool
On 1 October 2026 the Quebec Court of Appeal ordered court costs against a self-represented appellant in a family-law contempt appeal as a sanction for appeal filings that, in the court's description, he had written with artificial intelligence and that contained two references to non-existent judgments and one inaccurate reference to a cited paragraph. The court held that AI may be used to draft appeal filings only if the litigant verifies the authorities, found that he had breached the Chief Justice's notice on AI use, and described his conduct as negligence rather than bad faith. It rejected the respondent's request for a separate $10,000 sanction and, for reasons unrelated to AI, reduced the contempt penalty imposed at first instance. The decision does not name the AI tool.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026
1 May 2025CanadaChatGPT
An Ontario lawyer relied, at a 1 May 2025 Superior Court hearing in an estate and family-law matter, on a factum citing cases that do not exist or do not support the propositions cited. The judge ordered her to show cause why she should not be cited for contempt, then withdrew the order on 20 May 2025 after she said her staff had used ChatGPT without her knowledge. On 30 September 2025 she told the court that she alone had prepared the factum with ChatGPT and that her earlier account was untrue; the court referred the matter to Ontario’s Attorney General for criminal contempt proceedings in December 2025. In July 2026 the Law Society Tribunal suspended her licence for six months, finding she relied on AI-generated non-existent case law and lied about it. The account comes from legal-press and law-firm reports of the decisions; the criminal contempt case was still ongoing at the last report read.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 7 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 12/10/2026
7 Oct 2026ArgentinaUnidentified image tool
Infobae and La Nación, each citing the complaint or police report it accessed, report that on 7 October 2026 a 15-year-old fourth-year pupil at a private secondary school in Ituzaingó, Buenos Aires province, received messages from three unknown numbers inviting her out and saying they had got her number from a Telegram group; a link led her to a group sharing pornographic content that included images of her modified with artificial intelligence. According to the complaint, a 15-year-old classmate admitted to her that he had downloaded photos from her Instagram account, edited them with AI to undress her and posted them in the group. Her mother filed a complaint on 8 October 2026 and asked for the harassment to stop; the case is with the juvenile criminal prosecutor's office No. 2 of Morón under Article 128 of the Penal Code (sexual representations of minors for distribution or sale). The school told families that images of pupils from other years had also surfaced and called meetings for 9 October. Two smaller outlets report, without naming their sources, that four pupils aged 15 to 16 are under investigation, that a seven-year-old primary pupil is among possible victims and that a second complaint was filed by the school; La Nación says the police report does not state whether other people are under investigation. The local outlet La Ciudad, citing pupils' testimony including that of a pupil who spoke anonymously, reported that three boys aged 15 and 16 took photos from girls' Instagram profiles and covertly at breaks, sold the AI-altered images on Telegram, and sold one girl's phone number with them, after which she received repeated calls from unknown numbers; the outlet says pupils at the school bought the material, and the anonymous pupil said that, as she understood it, the images were offered for money and that girls from every year were affected. The tool is not identified and no court ruling is reported.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources · Added 10/10/2026
2 Oct 2026United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool
On 2 October 2026 the Nebraska Supreme Court struck the appellate brief of a self-represented party appealing a contempt order in his divorce case because the brief contained numerous citations to fictitious cases and misstatements of law, which the court said were the result of his admitted use of generative artificial intelligence. The court held that self-represented litigants are held to the same standard as attorneys and that submitting a brief relying on nonexistent authority is an abuse of the judicial process worthy of sanctions. Citing the novelty of the issue for self-represented parties, it stopped short of dismissing the appeal and reviewed only for plain error, finding none and affirming the district court's contempt finding, its sanction of 90 days' incarceration with purge conditions, a temporary reduction of his parenting time and an attorney-fee award. The court warned that in future cases dismissal of the appeal may follow. The opinion does not name the AI tool.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 1 source · Added 09/10/2026
23 Dec 2025 to 28 Apr 2026United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool
In December 2025 an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of North Carolina filed a response brief for the Department of Defense in a self-represented veteran's lawsuit over health-insurance coverage. The plaintiff identified fabricated quotations and misdescribed case holdings in it. The attorney first attributed the errors to an unfinalized draft filed by mistake. On 2 March 2026 Magistrate Judge Robert T. Numbers II ordered him to show cause why he should not be sanctioned. At the 10 March hearing the attorney, Rudy Renfer, said under oath that he had accidentally overwritten his draft, panicked and used artificial intelligence to draft the brief, and had not verified the cases it cited; he said he had resigned after 17 years in the office, and Courthouse News reported he was terminated the next day. On 28 April 2026 the court issued a public reprimand instead of a fine, writing that his reputation was in tatters and that his job loss already exceeded the usual fines.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 09/10/2026
3 Sept 2026 to 25 Sept 2026BrazilUnidentified case-analysis tool
On 25 September 2026 Brazil's Supreme Federal Court (STF) announced that it had identified, for the first time, hidden commands in a petition intended to steer the court's artificial-intelligence systems toward a decision favourable to one party. According to the STF, the Maria Shield function of its internal Maria AI platform found instructions in white, reduced-size letters, with some words unusually fragmented, in an appeal (ARE 1608713) filed for a public servant whose appointment to a post at the Minas Gerais prosecution service had been annulled. The rapporteur's vote, presented to the First Panel in a virtual session beginning that day, records the detection, states that his office does not use AI to analyse cases, orders the episode certified in the record and communicated to the bar association (OAB) and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF), and applies a fine of two minimum wages for breach of the duty of procedural loyalty (Code of Civil Procedure, article 77, IV). The vote names the lawyer responsible for the attempt, and the record does not say whether the fine falls on the party or the lawyer. The court states that the attempt had no effect on the analysis of the appeal because the rapporteur's office does not use AI to analyse cases; the appeal had already been rejected on 19 August 2026.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 07/10/2026
Dec 2024 to Sept 2026AustraliaUnidentified AI writing tool
In December 2024 the Parole Board of Tasmania added a condition to the parole of Susan Neill-Fraser, released in 2022 after serving 13 years for murder and who maintains her innocence, barring her from communicating with media to claim innocence or wrongful conviction; a broader condition replaced it in May 2025. On 15 September 2026 the Supreme Court of Tasmania declared the conditions invalid. Her counsel told the court that the board's secretary had used artificial intelligence to prepare a rationale document justifying the condition and that it cited case law that did not exist. The Human Rights Law Centre, which represented her, says the State conceded that the board's decision-making was affected by a document containing legal authorities that were likely AI-generated hallucinations, and the ABC reports the court found the board relied on that document. The board had withdrawn the condition in August 2026. Tasmania's Attorney-General announced an independent investigation of the board's professional standards over its use of unverified AI, and the Justice Department announced a review of AI use in past parole decisions.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 06/10/2026
Event date unknownEstoniaUnidentified AI writing tool
According to Delfi Ärileht and ERR (both 26 June 2026), complainants who went to the Tallinn Administrative Court to contest a felling permit sent the court a document that cited scientific work on the effects of clear-cutting. The court found that the Estonian scientists named in the references do not exist and that the studies could not be found. It asked how the document had been produced, gave the complainants the chance to submit the cited works, and warned of a fine for attempting to mislead the court. The complainants replied that using AI is not forbidden and that they had not meant to mislead the court. The court fined one complainant 150 euros and nine others 50 euros each, saying complainants are responsible for the accuracy of what they submit. Delfi Ärileht reports that the Tallinn Circuit Court agreed and that the Supreme Court declined the case that week, so the fines are in force. No report names the tool or says which complainant used it.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 05/10/2026