Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations
In the Interest of W.G., Minor Child
Iowa Court of Appeals · State appellate courts · IA · · 2026 WL 892837 · No. 25-1916 to intervene · opinion
On 2026-04-01, Iowa Court of Appeals struck the fabricated-citation portions of the petition on appeal, declined to dismiss the appeal, and considered only arguments untainted by the false authorities. A self-represented party submitted an appellate brief with fabricated or nonexistent authorities and mischaracterized authorities.
- Disposition
- The court struck the fabricated-citation portions of the petition on appeal, declined to dismiss the appeal, and considered only arguments untainted by the false authorities.
- Recorded conduct
- The appellate brief used fabricated or nonexistent authorities and mischaracterized authorities that the court found nonexistent, misquoted, or unsupported for the propositions asserted. — outcome: other; 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.
admitted that the case we believed to be our discretion, we elect a lesser sanction here. We strike hallucinated was in fact “non-existent” and her citation “d[id] the problematic portions of K.M.’s petition on appeal and not correspond to any Iowa appellate decision.” She also consider only the arguments we can discern without the taint admitted that AI led her to “attribut[e] specific propositions” of the fabricated and false citations. We thus assume without of law to a case in which those propositions “do not appear.” deciding we can reach the merits, in part to provide finality And she disclosed that she prepared the petition using the on this issue to the child affected by this juvenile proceeding. paid version of the AI tool Perplexity. See generally What Is Perplexity Pro?, Perplexity: Perplexity Help Center (Mar. 12, 2026), https://perma.cc/5DAL-2LXN. MERITS K.M. went on to apologize to the court and opposing party, Having finished our detour to address the briefing and she said that she believed she had verified the AI's legal misconduct, we review the juvenile court's ruling for citations but now understood she “made mistakes.” She wrote “correction of
compiled by the Cognesio LLP editorial teammethodas of 2026-09-07v0.1.1coding CC BY 4.0JSON Hugging Face GitHub
Hugging Face