Sanction teardown · D. Arizona, USA · 2026-08-24
Michael L. Ruiz v. Magellan Financial & Insurance Services (2)
What happened
In D. Arizona, USA, a filing relied on ChatGPT to help draft legal argument. The court identified the following problems with the citations in that filing:
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False Quotes (Case Law)AI-generated false direct quotation presented in the parenthetical of a case citation attributed to Antonakeas (Ninth Circuit) in Plaintiff's response to fees (Doc. 155).
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False Quotes (Case Law)AI-generated false direct quotation presented in the parenthetical of a case citation attributed to Osazuwa (Ninth Circuit) in Plaintiff's filings.
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False Quotes (Case Law)Additional fake AI-generated quotations detected across three different briefs filed by counsel beyond the two identified in Doc. 155.
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Misrepresented (Case Law)A fourth brief contained an inaccurate AI-generated case summary; counsel acknowledged ChatGPT cited Ansell v. Green Acres Contracting Co., 347 F.3d 515 (3d Cir. 2003) in support of a legal proposition.
Which AI tool
ChatGPT. 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
Formal public reprimand
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/2942/Ruiz_v._Magellan_Financial_USA_24_August_2026.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).