Sanction teardown · Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada · 2025-07-18
Moradi v. British Columbia (Human Rights Tribunal)
What happened
In Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, 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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Fabricated (Case Law)Index of authorities contained close to thirty new authorities, 22 of which the Court found were generated by ChatGPT and were not real cases; petitioner admitted they were produced by ChatGPT and 'turned out to be incorrect.' Court relied on this in assessing costs.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Example fabricated authority listed in the index; did not correspond to a real reported case and was generated by ChatGPT.
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Fabricated (Case Law)Second example of a fabricated authority generated by ChatGPT that the Court found did not exist.
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
Misconduct taken into account in allocating costs
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/740/Moradi_v._BC_Whole_Foods_Market_Canada_18_July_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).