Michael Cohen Admits He Used AI-Generated Legal Citations to Cases That Don’t Exist

Michael Cohen admitted in court that he unwittingly sent his attorney citations to nonexistent legal cases that were later included in a filing.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 after being convicted of tax evasion, a campaign finance violation, and other charges. The former lawyer for Donald Trump was released in May 2020 and served a year and a half of home confinement. He is currently serving three years of supervised release, which he is seeking to end early in Manhattan federal court.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman issued an order telling Cohen’s attorney, David M. Schwartz, to provide copies of three rulings cited in a motion he filed in November.

“As far as the Court can tell, none of these cases exist,” Furman wrote. The judge said if the cases were indeed fake, he would demand “a thorough explanation of how the motion came to cite cases that do not exist and what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played in drafting or reviewing the motion before it was filed.”

In a filing unsealed on Friday, Cohen,  who was disbarred after being convicted, provided the court with an explanation: he did not know that Bard – Google’s artificial intelligence tool – is an AI generator.

“As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not,” Cohen said. “Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”

Cohen asked the judge to exercise “discretion and mercy.”