Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations
Akerlund v. Atlas Air, Inc.
United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit · Federal courts of appeals · · No. 24-11033 · opinion
The Eleventh Circuit affirms dismissal of claims against Atlas Air and Flight Services International while referring plaintiffs’ counsel Anthony F. Sabatini for discipline. The court says his opening and proposed reply briefs contained repeated hallucinated case citations and that unverified AI-generated briefing violated duties to clients and the court.
- Disposition
- The court affirmed dismissal of the complaint and referred attorney Anthony F. Sabatini to the Eleventh Circuit Committee on Lawyer Qualifications and Conduct.
- Recorded conduct
- Plaintiffs’ counsel filed an opening brief and proposed reply brief containing repeated nonexistent, hallucinated case citations after opposing counsel identified the problem. — outcome: referral; actor: lawyer
- 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.
Though the filings in this case were substandard in a variety of ways, we have saved the worst for last. The plaintiffs’ counsel Anthony F. Sabatini’s filings are riddled with citations to nonexistent, “hallucinated” cases. His opening brief relies on at least eight such cases, including one purportedly decided by this Court. After the defendants identified this problem, Sabatini acknowledged in his (untimely) proposed reply brief that those citations were “erroneous or unverifiable,” and sought to withdraw his reliance on eight listed cases. At this point, things go from bad to worse: the eight cases Sabatini “withdrew” did not match a single one of the eight hallucinated cases in his opening brief. And not only were they not the right cases—all eight were also hallucinated.
We are far from the first court to see lawyers uncritically rely on artificial intelligence software and submit briefs citing nonexistent cases. See Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., 2023 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, at 5–6 (2023). The typical response when this kind of violation is identified is some version of an apology from the attorney, often with sanctions to follow. It is rare to see the kind of blatant and repeated misconduct that Sabatini has committed in this case.
Whatever the merits of artificial intelligence, it is no substitute for actual intelligence. Any “use of AI requires caution and humility.” Roberts, 2023 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, at 5. When lawyers rely on AI tools, there is no way to get around the obligation to verify that the software got it right, and that what it got wrong will not end up in court filings.
Authorities cited in the passage: Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., 2023 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary · A.B.A. Committee on Ethics & Professional Responsibility, Formal Opinion 512 · Model Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 1.1
compiled by the Cognesio LLP editorial teammethodas of 2026-09-07v0.1.1coding CC BY 4.0JSON Hugging Face GitHub
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