Incident 541: ChatGPT Produced False Court Case Law Presented by Legal Counsel in Court

Our summary

An AI Incident Database entry on Mata v. Avianca, where a lawyer filed a federal brief citing six judicial decisions that ChatGPT had fabricated — and which the model insisted were real when asked to verify. The court sanctioned the attorneys.

Why it matters

A real-world consequence of confabulated citations: the hallucination failure mode driving professional sanctions in a high-stakes domain. Grounds an abstract finding in a documented incident.

Related findings (1)

• Fabricated citations and referencesHigh

  Models invent plausible-looking but non-existent papers, authors, DOIs and URLs.

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