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Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations

Kevin Lee Biglow v. Dell Technologies Inc.

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit · Federal courts of appeals · · No. 25-3007 · order

Fabricated or misquoted citations

On 2026-03-24, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit affirmed dismissal and warned that further failure to check cited authority before filing could result in sanctions. A self-represented party submitted a reply brief with several false quotations, fabricated or nonexistent authorities and mischaracterized authorities, including Burton v. Ghosh and Iseminger v. Dist. Ct.

Disposition
The court affirmed dismissal and warned that further failure to check cited authority before filing could result in sanctions.
Recorded conduct
The reply brief used several false quotations, fabricated or nonexistent authorities and mischaracterized authorities, including Burton v. Ghosh and Iseminger v. Dist. Ct, which the court found nonexistent, misquoted, or unsupported. — outcome: warning; actor: litigant in person
Canonical record
Incident tracker entry — verified outcome, regulator disposition and related rules

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

any relevance to the argument Biglow attributes to the corresponding nonexistent case is Bentley, which states that “[f]ailure to plead an affirmative defense results in a waiver of that defense,” 41 F.3d at 604. There are similar fabrications in three of Biglow’s motions and in his reply briefs in support of all four motions. 10 Biglow’s fabricated case citations and other misrepresentations appear to stem from his use of a generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) tool, such as ChatGPT, without verifying the accuracy of the results. See Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc., 348 F.R.D. 489, 497 (D. Wyo. 2025) (“It is . . . well-known in the legal community that AI resources generate fake cases.”). Such fabrications are referred to as “AI hallucinations.” See Jones v. Kankakee Cnty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, 164 F.4th 967, 969 (7th Cir. 2026) (defining “a so-called AI ‘hallucination’” as “a circumstance where an AI large language model generates an output that is fictional, inaccurate, or nonsensical”). Assuming, without deciding, there is nothing inherently wrong with the use of AI to help prepare legal materials, a litigant’s failure to verify the accuracy of the authority cited results in waste

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