Florida appeal court makes a party's fee motion a route to sanction AI-faked citations

Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal sanctioned the appellants and their counsel in Kid International, LLC v. City National Bank of Florida, No. 4D2025-2599, on 7 October 2026, after an AI-assisted brief cited a hallucinated case seven times and attributed fabricated quotations to real authorities.

In Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal, counsel for Kid International filed an AI-assisted brief citing a hallucinated case seven times and fabricated quotations from real authorities. The court affirmed on the merits, granted the opposing party’s sanctions motion, and ordered the appellants and their counsel jointly and severally liable for the appellees’ reasonable appellate attorney’s fees.

What the brief contained

The court’s independent review found the initial brief relied on Ogilvie v. Sebring Airport Authority, 841 So. 2d 529 (Fla. 2d DCA 2003) — a case that does not exist — citing it seven times with a fictional quotation. It cited a real case, Mansolillo v. Parties by Lynn, Inc., with the wrong citation, court and year, for a proposition it did not support and with a quotation not in the opinion. It attributed to Seaboard Air Line Railroad Co. v. Holt a quotation that does not appear there.

Counsel’s response to the show-cause order accepted responsibility. He explained that his client had supplied research materials and that his “law firm incorporated generative artificial-intelligence (‘AI’) technology as one component of the legal research and drafting process,” and that his verification process “failed to identify before filing that certain authorities did not exist.” An amended brief, counsel admitted, still did not resolve every citation issue.

Why it matters

Florida appellate courts had already treated hallucinated authorities as sanctionable under their own power in Rule 9.410(a). The Fourth District went further: it held that the same reasoning supports a fee award when the opposing party moves for sanctions under Rule 9.410(b).

“we grant the defendants’ motion for sanctions and award defendants their reasonable attorney’s fees incurred in litigating this appeal.”

The amount is not yet fixed. The court remanded to the circuit court to set the reasonable fee, and made the appellants and their counsel jointly and severally liable. The pro se complaint below had cited thirty-two cases, fifteen of them non-existent, before an attorney filed an amended complaint that dropped them.

The ruling sits alongside Francois v. Vive Financial, where the same court held the submission of fictitious or fabricated case law sanctionable. The difference here is the mechanism: the cost of chasing fake cases can be shifted to the party that filed them, on that party’s opponent’s motion.

Record: Kid International, LLC v. City National Bank of Florida.

Sources

• Kid International, LLC v. City National Bank of Florida, No. 4D2025-2599 (Fla. 4th DCA Oct. 7, 2026) — court PDF via CourtListener storage
• Opinion landing page (CourtListener)