What was hallucinated

Fabricated: Case Law | Father's written application cited multiple authorities relating to ASD which HHJ Bailey concluded were not genuine and appeared to have been generated by AI; judge noted the Father 'relied upon faked cases' without checking veracity.

Details

The Father, acting pro se, relied in written submissions on numerous authorities (particularly about ASD) that HHJ Bailey identified as not genuine and apparently AI-generated; the court treated this as part of poor litigation conduct and awarded costs against him.

Sanction teardown · High Court, UK · 2025-07-30

The Father v The Mother

What happened

In High Court, UK, 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)

Father's written application cited multiple authorities relating to ASD which HHJ Bailey concluded were not genuine and appeared to have been generated by AI; judge noted the Father 'relied upon faked cases' without checking veracity.

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

Costs awarded against the Father (partly for relying on faked cases). (monetary penalty: 5900 GBP.)

Additional detail

The Father, acting pro se, relied in written submissions on numerous authorities (particularly about ASD) that HHJ Bailey identified as not genuine and apparently AI-generated; the court treated this as part of poor litigation conduct and awarded costs against him.

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.

Check a brief before you file it → · See our live false-verify rate

Source: https://naturalandartificiallaw.com/ai-hallucinations-and-or-fabricated-citations/, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).