Both sides of a lawsuit filed briefs built on AI-hallucinated citations. The judge canceled the trial and removed every lawyer from the case.
“This case presents the Court with an unusual scenario. Attorneys for both litigants engaged in similar sanctionable conduct.” · Senior U.S. District Judge Sharion Aycock
In a fee dispute in the Northern District of Mississippi, Judge Sharion Aycock sanctioned all four attorneys of record after filings from both sides cited cases that do not exist. The two out-of-state lawyers admitted using AI tools without verifying the output, and one kept using AI even after the court first flagged the fabricated citations. The two local counsel admitted they signed or permitted the filings without checking the authorities. The court found all four violated Rule 11, revoked two pro hac vice admissions, barred those two from the district for two years, fined all four, canceled the trial, and referred the order to state bar authorities. A public tracker maintained by researcher Damien Charlotin has by now logged roughly 1,600 filings nationwide containing AI-fabricated citations.
hallucinated cites
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Confident fabrication is the failure mode, and nothing independent stood between it and the court. The tools these lawyers used produced citations that read as authoritative and were not real. AVAAS certifies whether a model fabricates authoritative-sounding references under realistic use, and a model that invents citations does not pass. Certification does not relieve a professional of the duty to verify, and it does not stop a filing from going out. What it changes is whether a fabricating tool reaches the work at all, and what a deployer can later show about the system it relied on.
Withers v. City of Aberdeen, N.D. Miss., No. 24-cv-218 (Sanctions Order, June 8, 2026). yahoo.com · ABA Journal (June 9, 2026). abajournal.com
This entry is one of 37 documented cases in the AVAAS evidence ledger, a public record of AI and automated-system failures with a verified source on every entry.
Every case here reached a person.
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