Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations
Biglow v. Dell Technologies Inc.
United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit · Federal courts of appeals · · No. 25-3007 · opinion
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, denied pending motions, and warned Biglow about apparent misuse of generative AI.
- Recorded conduct
- Biglow relied on fabricated case law and made other misrepresentations in his reply brief and several motions. — 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