Trump-Appointed Federal Judge Scolds DOJ for Including Fake AI-Generated Case in Pleading

(Photo by Aaron Schwartz/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Attorneys with the Department of Justice were scolded by a federal judge in an order Thursday for using what appeared to be a fake AI-generated case citation.

During President Donald Trump’s second term, the DOJ has experienced a high level of turmoil and controversy, as the agency has seen a mass exodus of thousands of attorneys, a shockingly high level of criminal prosecutions being tossed out of court, and an erosion of trust with the judiciary.

The federal government’s recent legal pleadings in an immigration case won’t help matters.

As reported by Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, the DOJ’s attorneys seem to have included “a fake AI-generated citation” in a motion they filed in response to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

In a short three-page order, Chief Judge Hala Y. Jarbou of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, a Trump appointee, spent the majority of the text addressing the apparent AI case.

“There is one additional issue in this case that the Court must address,” wrote Jarbou, quoting from the DOJ’s response brief that cited a case citation of “Taylor v. Hott, 724 F. App’x 387, 392 (6th Cir. 2018).”

But that cited case was not located at the citation listed in the DOJ’s pleading (it was an entirely different case at that page number), and Jarbou wrote that the court researched but “was unable to identify a Sixth Circuit case with the caption Taylor v. Hott, or any federal case containing the quoted language.”

“Thus, it seems this citation was likely produced by generative artificial intelligence (‘AI’),” wrote Jarbou.

The judge quoted several past cases declaring it to be “improper and unacceptable for litigants…to submit non-existent judicial opinions with fake quotes and citations,” and issued an admonishment to the DOJ attorneys, noting that she was not imposing sanctions this but she implied such consequences were possible if this happened again in the future:

It should be obvious that any attorney who uses AI must scrupulously review its work product to ensure that the cited cases exist and that the citations accurately and fairly represent the underlying case law. The duty of candor towards this tribunal demands no less.

Although the Court will not presently impose sanctions for this conduct, it goes without saying that the Government must ensure its future filings with this Court do not include non-existent case law.

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