What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Defendant's statement of defense included multiple fictitious judicial decisions; defendant admitted the citations do not correspond to real rulings and that they were produced via AI; the court ordered those citations removed.

Details

Plaintiff alleged the defendant used AI to generate fictitious judicial decisions cited in the statement of defense; the defendant admitted the citations did not match existing decisions. The court found striking the entire defence to be an extreme remedy, denied the deletion request, but ordered the fabricated citations expunged from the defense. The court balanced the parties' rights and awarded procedural costs on unrelated grounds.

Sanction teardown · Magistrate's Court, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel · 2026-07-16

בדש נ' אוחנה

What happened

In Magistrate's Court, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel, a filing relied on an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:

Fabricated (Case Law)

Defendant's statement of defense included multiple fictitious judicial decisions; defendant admitted the citations do not correspond to real rulings and that they were produced via AI; the court ordered those citations removed.

Which AI tool

an unnamed/unconfirmed AI tool. Note: Charlotin's public database records tool attribution only where a court order, brief, or reporting on the matter states it explicitly; "unidentified" or "implied" means the record indicates AI use but does not name a specific product — we do not guess.

Outcome

False citations struck

Additional detail

How Citation Safe would have caught this

Citation Safe runs three deterministic layers before a brief is filed: (1) does the citation exist against CourtListener's database of published opinions, (2) if quoted, does that exact language appear in the source, (3) does the cited case actually support the proposition it is cited for. Fabricated case citations fail Layer 1. Fabricated or misattributed quotations fail Layer 2 even when the underlying case is real. Misrepresented holdings — a real case cited for a proposition it does not support — are the target of Layer 3. None of these checks involve asking another language model whether the citation looks right; they are lookups and text-matches against the actual source, which is why a hallucinated citation has to survive a direct lookup against the authoritative source — not another model's opinion — to earn a VERIFIED stamp; our measured false-verify rate is published live at /quality.

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Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/2676/badash.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

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