Nov 5, 2025Single source
Four lawyers sanctioned in Mississippi federal case after AI-hallucinated citations appeared in court filings
What the law is doingMisinformationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
In Withers v. City of Aberdeen, a federal judge in Mississippi reportedly sanctioned four lawyers after filings from both sides contained hallucinated legal citations tied to unverified AI use. The court said two attorneys used AI tools directly. All four were removed from the case and fined.
What this means for youAI tools can produce citations that look real but are false, and professionals remain responsible for checking them. If you hire a lawyer or other professional, it is reasonable to ask how they verify any AI-assisted work.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1533
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
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