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Zahariev v. Zaharieva

Court
Supreme Court of British Columbia
Jurisdiction
Canada
Decided
2025-06-09
AI tool
Implied
Outcome
—
Monetary penalty
None reported

What was hallucinated

Misrepresented: Case Law | Petitioner cited Thomson v. Thomson for a specific proposition that the judge could not locate; court found the case did not contain the asserted proposition (misrepresented precedent). || Fabricated: Case Law | Petitioner cited "Kovacs v. Kovacs, 2012 BCSC 1400" but the neutral citation exists for different parties and is not a Convention case; court identified mismatch. || Fabricated: Case Law | Petitioner cited "D.A.M. v. M.A.K., 2009 ONCJ 405"; court and clerk could not locate the case by those party names and the citation did not support the petitioner's proposition. || Fabricated: Case Law | Petitioner cited "C.A. v. G.T., 2012 NBQB 282" but the neutral citation did not correspond to those named parties and was not a Convention authority as asserted.

Sanction teardown · Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada · 2025-06-09

Zahariev v. Zaharieva

What happened

In Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, 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:

  • Misrepresented (Case Law)
    Petitioner cited Thomson v. Thomson for a specific proposition that the judge could not locate; court found the case did not contain the asserted proposition (misrepresented precedent).
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Petitioner cited "Kovacs v. Kovacs, 2012 BCSC 1400" but the neutral citation exists for different parties and is not a Convention case; court identified mismatch.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Petitioner cited "D.A.M. v. M.A.K., 2009 ONCJ 405"; court and clerk could not locate the case by those party names and the citation did not support the petitioner's proposition.
  • Fabricated (Case Law)
    Petitioner cited "C.A. v. G.T., 2012 NBQB 282" but the neutral citation did not correspond to those named parties and was not a Convention authority as asserted.

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

Not specified in source record.

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/741/Zahariev_v._Zaharieva_Canada_9_June_2025.pdf, via Damien Charlotin's public AI Hallucination Cases Database (CC0).

Source: https://www.damiencharlotin.com/documents/741/Zahariev_v._Zaharieva_Canada_9_June_2025.pdf

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