Courts on AI / Fabricated or misquoted citations
DOE, J. et al v. The Trustees of Columbia University
Supreme Court of the State of New York · State trial courts · NY · · No. 002 003 004 · opinion
The New York Supreme Court on 2026-05-05 granted dismissal motions, denied the Article 78 petition, and noted counsel’s withdrawal and apology for AI-fabricated citations in DOE, J. et al v. The Trustees of Columbia University. Counsel filed a reply brief with one fabricated case citation.
- Disposition
- The court granted dismissal motions, denied the Article 78 petition, and noted counsel’s withdrawal and apology for AI-fabricated citations.
- Recorded conduct
- Counsel filed a reply brief with one fabricated case citation. — outcome: other; 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.
For this reason, the Court need not reach the other dismissal arguments made, including those regarding service. A Caution on AI Hallucinations As a postscript to these motions, the Court must address certain AI-generated hallucinations in Petitioners’ papers. After the fake citations were pointed out in the reply papers, Petitioners’ counsel wrote a letter to the Court acknowledging the false citations, withdrawing them, and apologizing. At oral argument held on these motions, counsel reiterated the apology, acknowledged that the use of AI without proper checking was wrong, and identified the specific ways that steps were being taken by him and his firm to prevent future problems. While the Court does not deem it necessary to issue sanctions here, it does wish to issue a warning about the use of AI in preparing court documents.
compiled by the Cognesio LLP editorial teammethodas of 2026-09-07v0.1.1coding CC BY 4.0JSON Hugging Face GitHub
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