120 Court Cases Have Been Caught With AI Hallucinations, According to New Database
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Lawyers representing Anthropic recently got busted for using a false attribution generated by Claude in an expert testimony.
But that's one of more than 20 court cases containing AI hallucinations in the past month alone, according to a new database created by French lawyer and data scientist Damien Charlotin. And those were just the ones that were caught in the act. In 2024, which was the first full year of tracking cases, Charlotin found 36 instances. That jumped up to 48 in 2025, and the year is only half way over. The database, which was created in early May, has 120 entries so far, going back to June 2023.
A database of AI hallucinations in court cases shows the increasing prevalence of lawyers using AI to automate the grunt work of building a case. The second oldest entry in the database is the Mata v. Avianca case which made headlines in May, 2023 when law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman got caught citing fake cases generated by ChatGPT.
The database tracks instances where an AI chatbot hallucinated text, "typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments," according to the site. That means fake references to previous cases, usually as a way of establishing legal precedent. It doesn't account for the use generative AI in other aspects of legal documents. "The universe of cases with hallucinated content is therefore necessarily wider (and I think muchwider)," said Charlotin in an email to Mashable, emphasis original.
"In general, I think it's simply that the legal field is a perfect breeding ground for AI-generated hallucinations: this is a field based on load of text and arguments, where generative AI stands to take a strong position; citations follow patterns, and LLMs love that," said Charlotin.
[...] That said, Charlotin said the penalties have been "mild" so far and the courts have put "the onus on the parties to behave," since the responsibility of checking citations remains the same. "I feel like there is a bit of embarrassmentfrom anyone involved."
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.