New Mexico lawyer fined for using AI-generated brief containing fabricated testimony in The Guardian, curated on eChai

Founder Notes

Curated from The Guardian 11 September 2026
New Mexico lawyer fined for using AI-generated brief containing fabricated testimony →

Image from The Guardian

Every fabricated-citation case on this page invented a judgment. This one invented witnesses, in a murder appeal. Stephen Aarons, a Santa Fe defence lawyer, fed a machine-generated trial transcript to ChatGPT expecting a summary and filed what came back: testimony from four people who never gave it, two of them presented as police officers, down to what the shooter was wearing. He did not tell his client, who is serving a life sentence. At the hearing on 21 August Justice Bacon asked him the question quoted here. The order of 9 September holds him in contempt, fines him 5,000 US dollars payable to the state bar's client protection fund within 30 days, strikes every brief he filed, hands the appeal to the public defender to start over, bars him from the court while a disciplinary referral runs, and finds a lack of concern for his client. Aarons calls it an honest mistake.

Justice C. Shannon Bacon, Supreme Court of New Mexico, in The Guardian

Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world? [...] Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an ‘above-the-fold’ story every single day.

Read it in full on The Guardian →

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Curated from X →

Fangchang Ma is the co-founder and CEO of Nuance Labs in Seattle, which he started with Edward Zhang and Karren Yang after the three spent years at Apple working on how machines perceive and reconstruct people. Lightspeed led the round having backed the company before, as had Accel and South Park Commons; Nvidia and Define Ventures are new. The company says a public research preview of the model opens later this year.

Fangchang Ma 5h

We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc!

Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life.

At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague.

We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth.

Join us!
Vanshita Tekwani the social whiz 14h

Last Saturday, I attended an eChai Ventures session on GTM & Distribution for Startups, and I genuinely enjoyed this one.

What I liked most was that the session didn’t start with someone coming in and simply giving us their insights.

It started with us.
What are you building?
Where are you stuck?
What problem are you currently facing?

And then the conversation went from there.

The speakers shared what worked for them, what didn’t, mistakes they had made, and how they would approach some of the problems people in the room were facing.

And I think there’s a huge advantage in that.

Sometimes you can avoid a few mistakes simply because someone else was open enough to talk about theirs.

Manoj Adwani, who was hosting the session, kept adding his own experiences throughout the conversation. Even people in the room were sharing what they had tried and what they had learned.

So it never really felt like a one-way session. It felt more like a room full of people comparing notes on building businesses.

For me, especially at a stage where I’m building, experimenting and trying to understand as much as I can about business and the market, these are exactly the kind of rooms I want to be in more often.

You come with your own problems, hear how someone else dealt with theirs, question a few things you’re doing, and leave knowing a little more than you did before.

Definitely a Saturday well spent😁✨
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Originally on LinkedIn →
Curated from Colossus 13 September 2026
Profile of Mark Zuckerberg →

Image from Colossus

Jeremy Stern, the editor-in-chief of Colossus, spent a summer around Mark Zuckerberg: a morning in the fighting studio at Lake Tahoe, the AI glasses launch in New York, a sitting with his parents, and Shabbat dinner with his family. The profile turns on what scholars call the dictator’s dilemma, the ruler whose court stops telling him what he does not want to hear, and Stern reads Zuckerberg’s habits against it: the direct reports of his direct reports, the outsiders invited in to argue, three mornings a week of getting punched. It also tells the eleven weeks after Llama 4, when he folded FAIR into Meta Superintelligence Labs and replaced a decade of AI people and strategy, and asks his competitors to steelman the case that he wins. The extract is that problem stated whole, and anyone who has been the last word in their own company for a few years will know the shape of it.

Jeremy Stern, in Colossus

The idea is simple and intuitive: The more power a man acquires, the more his empire expands, the more he depends on other people for information about everything from his own court to the furthest reaches of the empire. And yet through fear or awe or self-preservation, those people often become less willing to tell him what they think he doesn’t want to hear, leaving him increasingly insulated from reality even as the consequences of his decisions become larger, and as the barriers to believing one’s own bullshit fall away.

Read it in full on Colossus →

Profile of Mark Zuckerberg on the reading room

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