Sanction teardown · QBCCMCmr, Australia · 2026-07-14
Broadwater Tower [2026] QBCCMCmr 221
What happened
In QBCCMCmr, Australia, 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:
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Fabricated (Legal Norm)Applicant's AI-generated summary asserted an 'Interim Budget Rule (The "Gap" Period)' entitling an 'interim spending allowance' for the period between financial year end and AGM; adjudicator found no such rule in legislation or authorities.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Adjudicator noted generative AI can 'make up fake cases, citations and quotes' and refer to non-existent legislation, citing precedent and guidelines warning of such fabrications.
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
No professional sanction or monetary penalty. Application for interim orders dismissed; adjudicator warned applicant to verify AI-generated content for accuracy if proceeding to final orders.
Additional detail
The applicant relied on AI-generated summaries that asserted an 'Interim Budget Rule (The "Gap" Period)' and an 'interim spending allowance' that the adjudicator found does not exist and is inconsistent with the legislation and cited source material. The adjudicator treated the AI material as potentially inaccurate or fabricated, declined to treat it as raising a serious legal question, dismissed the interim application, and cautioned the applicant to verify any AI-generated content before relying on it in further proceedings.
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/2979/Broadwater_Tower_2026_QBCCMCmr_221_14_July_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).