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
Event date unknownEvent location unknownUnidentified AI writing tool
A case summary published in July 2025 by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA), the independent student complaints scheme for England and Wales, describes a student who was called to a viva over concerns about a dissertation and told the examiners there that AI had been used to help write it. The student agreed the AI material was not referenced and had not declared the AI use on the form the provider required. A panel found academic misconduct and gave a mark of zero; the provider rejected the student's appeal. The student complained to the OIA, saying they received no credit for being honest about using AI or for the time and effort invested. The OIA found the complaint Not Justified, concluding that the provider followed its procedures, gave the student a fair opportunity to respond and applied a proportionate penalty. The summary does not name the provider, give the date of the events or say which AI tool was used.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 23/10/2026
15 Nov 2022 to 27 May 2023Event location unknownUnidentified video tool
On 26 September 2025 the Federal Court of Australia ordered a man to pay civil penalties of A$343,500 plus costs, in what the eSafety Commissioner said was the first proceeding to impose a civil penalty under the Online Safety Act 2021. On facts he admitted, he posted 12 non-consensual deepfake intimate images of six women ordinarily resident in Australia to a deepfake website between November 2022 and May 2023. He made each one by uploading a photo of the woman found online to a webpage that created semi-naked or naked images and saving the generated image. He refused eSafety's removal notice, so two images stayed online for almost a year, and he admitted posting some later images in retaliation against people involved in issuing the notice. Each woman complained to eSafety, and the court found the posts were likely to have caused them hurt and distress. The eSafety Commissioner called this kind of deepfake abuse a misuse of easily accessible AI tools.
Core concern High reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement supported · Causal attribution established · 5 sources · 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
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
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