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
26 Jun 2025 to 27 Jun 2025VietnamStudyX and Gemini
Hanoi police said on 1 July 2025 that they had opened a criminal case for unintentionally disclosing state secrets after two candidates in Vietnam's national high school graduation exam on 26 and 27 June 2025 smuggled phones into exam rooms, photographed exam papers and used AI apps to solve them. According to the police account reported by Thanh Nien and VnExpress, one candidate uploaded part of the maths paper to the StudyX app but copied only two answers, and did the same in the chemistry and physics papers; the other photographed the maths, history and English papers and used Gemini, was caught by the exam board and was suspended from the exam. A photo of part of the maths paper had appeared on an AI maths-solving app before the exam ended, worrying candidates and parents about exam security. Police said students who did this would be disqualified, have their results annulled and could face administrative or criminal action. Neither candidate is named.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026
26 Jun 2025VietnamChatGPT
On 26 June 2025, during the literature paper of Vietnam's national high school graduation exam in Lam Dong province, an invigilator caught an 18-year-old candidate using a hidden button camera and wireless earpiece and suspended him from the exam. According to the provincial police account reported by Bao Lam Dong and VnExpress, he had streamed the paper to a 17-year-old friend at an internet cafe, who photographed part of it, used the ChatGPT app to solve it and read the answers to him over a Messenger call. On 27 June 2025 the Lam Dong police security investigation agency opened a criminal case for intentionally disclosing and appropriating state secrets, because unreleased graduation exam papers are classified; police said initially that only the two young people were involved and that they had found no further sharing of the paper. Neither is named.
Core concern Medium reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 23/10/2026
21 Oct 2025 to 3 Apr 2026United StatesCoCounsel
In a published opinion of 3 April 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit addressed the briefs a lawyer appointed under the Criminal Justice Act had filed for an indigent defendant appealing a sentencing enhancement in a drug-trafficking case. The court noticed that the principal brief's file name was 'CoCounsel Skill Results' and found three quotations that appear in no legal authority and misstatements of two precedents. The lawyer admitted that a staff member had used Westlaw's CoCounsel to create the first draft, that he repeated the process for the reply, and that the false quotations came from artificial intelligence he did not verify. The court denied him compensation for the appeal, referred the opinion for possible disciplinary proceedings and to the Kentucky Bar Association, and by separate order removed him, locked his briefs and ordered replacement counsel to file new ones, which it said further delayed resolution of the defendant's appeal. The court acknowledged his candour and his 40 years without discipline.
Core + contextual relations Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 19/10/2026
Jun 2025PolandUnidentified image tool
In June 2025, according to OKO.press, a group of pupils at a primary school in central Poland took a classmate's photo from the internet, used an application that offers to "undress" people in uploaded photos to generate a nude image bearing her face, posted it on the school's Instagram profile and urged others to order more such images. Poland's Personal Data Protection Office (UODO) says the girl was under 15 and notified the police, but the police declined to open proceedings and the prosecutor's office upheld that decision, finding no prohibited act; Gazeta Prawna reports that they considered the AI-generated material not pornographic and the pupil unharmed. The UODO president appealed to the Prosecutor General, in January 2026 the authority announced that prosecutors had informed it they were taking up the case again, and in June 2026 it said its president had recently asked once more for the investigation to be resumed. The application is not named.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 19/10/2026
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
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
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
20 Jun 2025MalaysiaUnidentified video tool
Malay Mail, carrying a Bernama report of a Selangor police statement, reports that police were investigating a video that began circulating on TikTok on 20 June 2025. It showed an individual resembling former inspector-general of police Acryl Sani Abdullah Sani and purportedly linked him to receiving financial assistance from a person titled 'Datuk', with the money deposited into a bank account. Selangor police chief Hussein Omar Khan said the video was fake and had been manipulated using artificial intelligence, that the claims were untrue and baseless, and that the former police chief never issued any statement as depicted. Acryl Sani lodged a police report denying that the video contained any official statement from him. Police opened an investigation under Section 419 of the Penal Code and Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998. The statement does not say how police established that AI was used, and the tool is not named.
Core concern Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 13/10/2026
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
26 Jun 2025 to 17 Nov 2025United KingdomUnidentified AI tool
Judicial review grounds lodged in the Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) on 26 June 2025 by a solicitors' firm cited four authorities that the judge could not find or that carried wrong citations and propositions. The firm's compliance officer, a solicitor whose name was on the claim form, said a junior fee-earner had drafted the grounds under his supervision; his written explanation named an outdated precedent, practitioner blogs and personal notes as the sources. After a Hamid hearing on 5 November 2025, the tribunal recorded that he accepted the fee-earner had relied on false citations generated by AI, and in a judgment promulgated on 17 November 2025 it referred him to the Solicitors Regulation Authority for the false citations and his failure to supervise. The tribunal said it does not matter how such errors come about. It also announced that the Upper Tribunal judicial review claim form now requires a statement of truth that cited authorities exist and support the propositions they are cited for.
Contextual tracker case Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 1 source · Added 12/10/2026
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
5 Nov 2025 to 8 Jun 2026United StatesFirst Drafts and unidentified legal research tool
In a fee dispute between a Louisiana attorney and the City of Aberdeen, Mississippi, briefs filed for both sides in late 2025 cited six cases that do not exist. The attorneys admitted the citations came from unverified AI use: the plaintiff's out-of-state counsel, Kathleen M. Wilson, drafted her filing with an AI drafting program called 'First Drafts', and the City's out-of-state counsel, Kathryn Y. Williams, used an in-house AI legal research tool. Senior Judge Sharion Aycock stayed the case and cancelled the March 2026 trial, then on 8 June 2026 revoked both attorneys' pro hac vice admissions, barred them from the district for two years and fined them $2,500 and $3,500, and disqualified and fined the two local counsel who had signed the filings. Both litigants were left without counsel and given 60 days to find new representation.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 4 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
Nov 2025United StatesChatGPT
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.
Contextual tracker case Low reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Dec 2025MalaysiaUnidentified image tool
In early December 2025 a Chinese secondary school in Muar, Johor, expelled three male pupils in Forms 2, 3 and 4 after finding they had used AI software to composite several female classmates' faces onto indecent images, some of which had spread online. The school said it was told of the images on Monday 1 December, investigated immediately, met the parents of all pupils involved, expelled the three under its rules with a stated zero-tolerance policy, and urged victims to lodge police reports and parents to delete any such images. The boys' parents accepted the decision. At least two girls lodged police reports; the Muar district police chief confirmed reports had been received, that the boys had been summoned to assist the investigation, and that an investigation was under way. No charge or later outcome has been reported.
Core concern High reported severity Involving minors Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 20/09/2026
Oct 2025United StatesUnidentified video tool
From around October 2025, criminals used AI to clone the image, voice, name, signature and firm logo of Ángel Leal, a long-established immigration attorney in Doral, Florida. They created fake videos, look-alike websites, forged contracts and even fabricated Zoom 'immigration hearings' to persuade immigrants to pay for legal services Leal never provided. Immigrants were defrauded of money, and some believed their cases were progressing when they were not; Leal received one to two defrauded callers a day, changed his phone number, hired an anti-piracy firm that removed thousands of fake profiles and videos, and reported the fraud to local police and federal authorities.
Core concern Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources · Added 17/09/2026
1 Aug 2025 to 9 Sept 2026United StatesChatGPT
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.
Core concern Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 3 sources · Added 15/09/2026
Feb 2025Hong Kong SAR ChinaUnidentified image tool
In February 2025 a University of Hong Kong (HKU) law student was found, by friends who saw the files on his laptop, to have used free online AI software to make about 700 indecent and deepfake images of some 20 to 30 women, including university and former schoolmates and secondary-school teachers, using photos taken from their social media. Victims went public in July 2025, and HKU's initial response, a warning letter and a demand that he apologise, drew wide criticism. Hong Kong's Privacy Commissioner opened a criminal investigation on 15 July 2025 but announced on 17 December 2025 that it was ending the probe for insufficient evidence, as no victim was willing to provide further information. Hong Kong law criminalised distribution, not creation, of such images.
Core concern High reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution supported · 5 sources · Added 29/01/2026