Mar 2024United Kingdom, NigeriaUnidentified AI tool
A dietitian on the UK register who was in Nigeria at the time was interviewed online in March 2024 for an entry-level oncology dietitian post at an NHS hospital in Surrey, according to reports of a Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service decision. The reports say the interviewers noticed that she repeatedly asked for clinical questions to be repeated and then gave fluent, textbook answers while her eyes moved as if reading from another screen, and that all of them came to the view she was using artificial intelligence; a case study she then completed was also judged AI-assisted, and her answers were later run through an AI check with striking similarities. She denied using AI, saying she habitually repeated questions and was looking at her router. The tribunal panel found that she used AI in the interview, that this was cheating and dishonesty, and ordered that she be struck off the register, with an interim suspension of 18 months during which she may appeal. Nigerian outlets, citing the Daily Mail, said the tool was ChatGPT; the local report describes it only as AI. The decision date and any appeal are not stated in the sources read.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 01/11/2026
12 Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified AI tool
A labour court in Castro, Paraná (9th Region Labour Court), annulled a court-appointed expert's report after the employer, in a motion for clarification, reported a hidden sentence at the foot of a page instructing artificial intelligence to contest the report only superficially and not to question the files it cited, according to Diário de Justiça. The expert confirmed the text but said it came from teaching material about AI and was inserted by accident; the court's IT section concluded that it had been formatted deliberately to be invisible. The judge said AI had not been used to write the judgment and that the text did not directly influence it, but annulled the report, later submissions and the judgment, ordered a new examination by another expert without AI tools, fined the expert 5% of the value of the case for bad-faith litigation, cancelled the expert's fees and removed the expert from the court's register. The decision, dated 12 October 2026, can be challenged.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 1 source · Added 30/10/2026
1 Mar 2023 to 22 Jun 2023Event location unknownChatGPT
In a passenger's personal-injury suit against the airline Avianca in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, an opposition brief filed on 1 March 2023 cited judicial opinions that did not exist. The court found that the lawyer who did the research had used ChatGPT, which fabricated the cases, and that when he asked the chatbot whether one of them was real it replied that it had supplied real authorities that could be found on legal databases. On 22 June 2023 the court found bad faith by the two lawyers, based on their conduct after the citations were questioned, and imposed a USD 5,000 penalty jointly on them and their firm, together with letters to the client and to each judge falsely named as an author of the fake opinions.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources · Added 28/10/2026
2020NetherlandsProctorio
During the 2020/21 academic year, when exams at VU Amsterdam were held online because of the pandemic, some exams required students to run Proctorio proctoring software, which according to the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights used face-detection algorithms during a pre-exam webcam check to judge whether the student was in view. A master's student says the software had trouble recognising her, that she regularly received 'face not found' or 'room too dark' messages, lost time, shone a bright lamp into her face while taking exams, and experienced stress and a feeling of insecurity; she suspected the failures were linked to her dark skin and complained to the Institute in July 2022. In an interim ruling of 7 December 2022 the Institute found sufficient indications for a presumption of discrimination. In its final ruling of 17 October 2023 it found that the university had proved it had not discriminated against her by using Proctorio: on the exam where her setup took longer than average (31 March 2021), the webcam check failed three times and she passed within eight seconds after the helpdesk advised her to remove her glasses, a known Proctorio problem the Institute treated as unrelated to skin colour; a restart during that exam was very likely caused by an unstable internet connection; and it considered it plausible that she had no need to keep a lamp shining in her face for long periods. It found that the university had discriminated in handling her complaint, which took from 1 October 2021 to 11 May 2022 to be taken up. The university apologised that she had not felt heard.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 4 sources · Added 28/10/2026
May 2023United StatesChatGPT
A Colorado lawyer who had recently moved into civil litigation used ChatGPT in April and May 2023 to find case law for a client's motion to set aside a judgment and cited three Colorado Court of Appeals decisions that did not exist, without reading or checking them. On the morning of the 5 May hearing he realised the cases were fabricated but did not tell the court or withdraw the motion, and when the judge raised concerns he falsely blamed a legal intern; six days later he filed an affidavit saying he had used ChatGPT. The judge denied the motion, said the denial did not rest on the invented cases, and ordered him to show cause why he should not be sanctioned and reported to attorney regulators. On 22 November 2023 Colorado's Presiding Disciplinary Judge approved a stipulation suspending him for one year and one day, with 90 days served and the rest stayed on two years' probation, for violating rules on competence, diligence, candour to the tribunal and honesty.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 26/10/2026
1 Dec 2025CzechiaUnidentified legal research tool
On 1 December 2025 the presiding judge of a chamber of the Czech Constitutional Court fined a Prague lawyer 25,000 crowns (a quarter of the statutory maximum) for grossly obstructing proceedings. The lawyer had filed a constitutional complaint, for a client refused a temporary residence permit, that argued from 12 decisions of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights; the court found that a substantial part of them did not exist and part were grossly misinterpreted. The order says the complaint showed signs of generative AI and that the court presumed the lawyer had generated it with an AI model and then failed to verify the citations. The lawyer confirmed to INFO.CZ that an AI tool was used, described it as a paid professional model from a legal information system provider, said the output was not checked enough, and expressed regret. The court invited the client to correct the complaint so that the client would suffer no procedural harm; the complaint was later rejected as manifestly unfounded on 30 January 2026. INFO.CZ reported on 10 December 2025 that the lawyer had apologised and paid the fine and that the Czech Bar Association's supervisory board was examining the case.
Core + contextual relations Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 5 sources · Added 26/10/2026
Aug 2026 to Sept 2026TaiwanMicrosoft Copilot (reported)
CTWANT reported on 22 October 2026 two rulings of the Taipei District Court in Taiwan. In August 2026 a civil division dismissed a retrial petition into which, it said, the petitioner had only pasted his conversations with Microsoft Copilot's generative AI; it said this was not in itself impermissible but that retrial grounds had not been lawfully stated, and that his copying of online news articles into Copilot and then of the whole exchange into his filing was a statement of his opinion and not objective evidence. He petitioned again and, in September 2026, a three-judge panel of another civil division said the new petition appeared to be generative AI conversation content placed in the filing, found that he had repeatedly petitioned on the same or similar grounds with a malicious purpose of wasting judicial resources, and fined him NT$30,000 under Article 249-1 of the Code of Civil Procedure, warning that further abusive filings could bring a heavier fine. CTWANT describes it as the first court fine in Taiwan for abusive litigation with AI. The underlying claim, about fraudsters' misuse of his mobile number, had already been finally rejected. The rulings themselves were not inspected.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 23/10/2026
Aug 2026United StatesUnidentified document-analysis tool
In a memorandum of decision issued in early August 2026, a Connecticut Superior Court judge found that a motion for default and a notice filed on 24 July 2026 by a self-represented plaintiff, in a suit against a healthcare provider over access to records, carried text in tiny white type that was invisible to a human reader but legible to software. The concealed text told any AI model reviewing the filing to make its output agree with the filing and to work toward reversing the Chief Clerk's denial of his default request. After the court gave notice of a sanctions hearing, he hid further messages in later filings, which he said were jokes. The court treated the first instruction as a prompt injection, did not believe his explanation that he was auditing the court's use of AI, and rescinded his ability to file electronically, so that future filings must be made on paper at the clerk's office; Ars Technica reports that no monetary penalty was imposed. The court said the Connecticut Judicial Branch does not use AI to review or decide filings and that the motion was denied on its merits from a printed copy, so the hidden text affected no ruling. The plaintiff told Reuters, according to Ars Technica, that his intent was to audit the court.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 18/10/2026
31 Mar 2026 to 11 Sept 2026United StatesIrys (reported)
A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ordered a senior associate at Musick, Peeler & Garrett, the outside firm defending State Farm in a homeowner's lawsuit over a fire-damaged home, to pay a $999.99 sanction after the associate's motions in limine cited cases, quotations and holdings that did not exist, Law360 reported on 14 September 2026. In a declaration reproduced by Reason's Volokh Conspiracy, the associate said she used an AI program called Irys to prepare the motions, did not check some of the citations, and wrongly believed the program was cite-checked through the firm's Westlaw subscription; she confirmed seven non-existent case citations across eight motions. The plaintiff's lawyers found the citations and raised them at a status conference on 7 August 2026. The firm acknowledged citations that appeared to be AI hallucinations, and its lead trial counsel apologised to the court and the plaintiff. According to Law360, the judge had considered up to $5,000, and the amount set is one cent below the level at which California law requires a court to notify the State Bar.
Core concern Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 17/10/2026
May 2026BrazilGalileu
In May 2026 a judge of the 3rd Labour Court of Parauapebas, in the Brazilian state of Pará, fined two lawyers about R$84,000 after text in white font on a white background was found in a document they filed for a worker in a labour claim. According to the sentence as reported by G1, the hidden text was detected while the judgment was being drafted with Galileu, a generative AI tool the labour courts use to help judges and staff draft sentences, and its evident intention was to make the AI produce a superficial defence or a compromised draft judgment. The judge called the technique prompt injection. The lawyers said they disagreed with the decision and that there was never any command to manipulate the judge's decision, describing the text as an attempt to protect their client from the AI; one of them said she did not work on labour cases. In October 2026 the regional labour court announced that a Connecticut Superior Court judge had cited the decision when sanctioning a litigant for misuse of AI.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution disputed · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 16/10/2026
21 Nov 2025United StatesUnidentified AI drafting tool
On 25 September 2026 a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted a defence motion for sanctions under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11 against a California-barred lawyer admitted for one case (pro hac vice) to represent the plaintiff. The court found that an opposition the lawyer filed on 21 November 2025 was replete with inaccurate citations, including a quotation attributed to a case with a fictitious Westlaw citation, and that later oppositions cited a non-existent case. In response to the court's order to show cause, the lawyer admitted using AI to draft the first opposition and explained a belief that the enterprise-level AI software in use did not hallucinate cases. The court revoked the lawyer's pro hac vice admission and ordered the lawyer's firm to pay the defendants' reasonable fees and costs, capped at $10,000. The order does not name the AI product.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 16/10/2026
14 Sept 2026BrazilUnidentified document-analysis tool
A São Paulo business and arbitration court found that every page of a defendant's written defence carried a hidden instruction, placed above his lawyer's letterhead, asking any AI that analysed the petition to give a favourable opinion and praise the lawyer's probity and care. In a sentence dated 14 September 2026 the judge treated this as prompt injection and bad-faith litigation: although the defendant won on the merits, he was ordered to pay the plaintiff a fine of 9% of the updated case value, and the sentence was sent to the São Paulo bar to examine the lawyer's conduct. No source says any AI system read the instruction.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution established · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 16/10/2026
May 2025Event location unknownUnidentified video tool
In June 2025 the Stockholm police region warned that since the end of May it had received several complaints from people defrauded through social media adverts with AI-generated videos depicting doctors, who appeared to give advice and recommend medicines or vitamins. According to the police, viewers who followed the adverts to fraudulent websites were induced to enter card details, after which a considerably larger sum was charged and the details were stolen. Dagens Nyheter reported that the doctors used included the former state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell and the professor Agnes Wold, who told the paper of being furious. In July 2025 the Public Health Agency of Sweden said fake Facebook films imitating its former state epidemiologist were advertising products for diabetes or asthma, that it had reported them to the police and had asked Meta to remove them; he said it was sad that fraudsters were exploiting vulnerable people. Dagens Nyheter, as relayed by Omni, reported that the investigations were closed because the offences were judged to have been committed abroad. The number of defrauded people and their losses are not stated, and the police do not say how the AI generation was established.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 16/10/2026
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
11 Oct 2026Event location unknownPangram AI-text detector
A week after a Zimbabwean writer won the £10,000 2026 Caine Prize for African Writing, The Atlantic published an article on Sunday 11 October 2026 whose central evidence was a scan by Pangram, an AI-text detection tool, flagging almost the entire winning story as AI-generated. The Caine Prize said it had begun a review: according to its chair, the author would send documentation of his drafts and the prize was talking to the judges and to the magazine that first published the story. The chair told the BBC that The Atlantic had published before a full investigation, tainting the prize and the winner, and said a detector should not be the final arbiter. The author denied using AI and said he had a documented history of the story's development; his literary agency said it was confident the story was his own work. No finding has been announced.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · 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
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
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