Description: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit sanctioned attorneys Van Irion and Russ Egli after reportedly finding more than two dozen fake citations and alleged factual misrepresentations in appellate briefs in Whiting v. City of Athens. The court asked whether generative AI had been used, but the attorneys reportedly did not answer that question. Public reporting described the filings as bearing hallmarks of AI hallucinations.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown large language model developers and Unknown generative AI developers developed an AI system deployed by Van Irion and Russ Egli, which harmed U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit , City of Athens, Tennessee , Epistemic integrity and Judicial integrity.
Alleged implicated AI systems: Unknown large language models and Unknown generative AI systems
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1447
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2026-03-13
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
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March 16 (Reuters) - An appeal containing fake case citations that misrepresent the law can be dismissed as frivolous, a U.S. federal appeals court panel said in a decision sanctioning two attorneys who submitted filings that bore hallmark…
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The Sixth Circuit finally weighed in on the use of fake cases hallucinated by artificial intelligence. A panel recently sanctioned two Tennessee attorneys for a smorgasbord of misconduct during merits briefing, including citing fake cases. …
Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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