What went wrong when people put AI to work.

Curated from blog.ipleaders.in · 6 July 2026 →

India's courts said this early. The Delhi High Court's Louboutin ruling is from August 2023, two months after Mata v. Avianca in New York, and it has been quoted in Indian courtrooms ever since. What followed anyway: a tax tribunal in Bengaluru recalling an order of roughly 669 crore rupees over four citations that do not exist; the Bombay High Court quashing a faceless tax assessment of about 27.91 crore in October 2025 because it rested on three invented precedents; and a 50,000 rupee cost order from the same court in January 2026, where what gave the submission away was not the citation but the writing, green tick marks copied out of a chat window and phrasing that repeated itself. The consequence that matters commercially is in the second of those: the order collapses, and the matter reopens.

Curated from medianama.com · 3 July 2026 →

On 2 July 2026 a bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Alok Aradhe set aside orders of the National Company Law Tribunal and its appellate tribunal in the Essel Infraprojects insolvency matter. Of the six judgments the tribunal had relied on, three do not exist and three real ones carried invented paragraphs or the wrong case title. The detail that makes this different from every lawyer-sanctioned case elsewhere on this page is in Jammu and Kashmir Bank's affidavit: counsel had cited none of the six. The tribunal had found them itself, and the appellate tribunal did not catch them either. The court's comparison is to Bhopal. It directed the Bar Council of India to frame disciplinary norms.

livelaw.in Phantom Precedents: The Rise Of AI-Generated Case Law In Indian Courts

Curated from livelaw.in · 17 March 2026 →

Two of the Indian cases that led to the Supreme Court's ruling. In February 2026 a bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant raised AI-drafted petitions being filed without anybody checking them, and Justice Nagarathna said she had been handed a case that does not exist. Five months earlier a Delhi High Court petition had quoted paragraphs 73 and 74 of a 1972 Supreme Court judgment that runs to 27 paragraphs, and was withdrawn once opposing counsel checked. That is the harder version of the failure and it recurs across these cases: not an invented case, which a search will disprove, but invented text inside a real one, which only somebody who opens the judgment will catch.

Curated from theregister.com · 6 October 2025 →

Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations paid Deloitte around 440,000 Australian dollars to review the Targeted Compliance Framework, the automated system that penalises welfare recipients. The report was published in August 2025. A University of Sydney academic, Chris Rudge, then found citations to papers that do not exist, including several attributed to a real law professor, and a fabricated quotation from a Federal Court judgment in the robodebt case. Deloitte issued a corrected version stripping more than a dozen references, added a disclosure of the AI toolchain that had not been in the original, and refunded the final instalment, about 97,000 Australian dollars. The department says the findings and recommendations are unchanged.

Curated from reason.com · 7 July 2025 →

Eric Coomer, formerly of Dominion Voting Systems, sued Mike Lindell and his media company for defamation. His opponents' brief carried close to thirty defective citations: misquotations, misstatements of law, and cases that do not exist. The lawyers' explanation was that they had accidentally filed an earlier draft and that human error was to blame. Judge Wang sanctioned both of them 3,000 US dollars in July 2025. The jury separately awarded Coomer 2.3 million dollars. A year later the same lead counsel was before the same court over further citations that do not exist, which is why this one is here rather than any of the fifteen hundred others: the first sanction is what is supposed to prevent the second.

Curated from chicago.suntimes.com · 30 May 2025 →

On 18 May 2025 the Chicago Sun-Times printed a 64-page summer supplement carrying a reading list of fifteen books. Ten of them do not exist, though the authors do: an invented Isabel Allende novel, an invented Taylor Jenkins Reid, an invented Brit Bennett. The section was licensed from King Features, a Hearst syndication unit, and written by a freelancer who used AI to compile it and did not check the output or disclose it. King Features ended the relationship; the Sun-Times published a correction, refunded subscribers for the issue and its chief executive wrote the piece quoted here. A later internal review found further fabricated quotes and experts elsewhere in the same supplement.

Curated from techcrunch.com · 18 May 2025 →

Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation was the most cited empirical claim of 2024 about what AI does to research productivity: a materials lab given an AI tool discovered more materials and filed more patents, while the scientists enjoyed the work less. It was covered widely and praised by two Nobel laureates in economics, Daron Acemoglu and David Autor, who are the two quoted here withdrawing that support. A computer scientist raised concerns with them in January 2025; MIT ran an internal review and in May said the paper should be withdrawn from public discourse, and that its author was no longer at MIT. He had not filed the arXiv withdrawal himself, so MIT asked arXiv directly. Nobody has published evidence that the paper was written by AI. It is filed here because the unverified claim in question was a claim about AI, and it travelled further than any of the studies that were checked.

Curated from incidentdatabase.ai · 15 May 2025 →

Anthropic is being sued by Universal Music, Concord and ABKCO over song lyrics used in training. In April 2025 one of its own data scientists filed an expert declaration, and the publishers told the court it cited an academic article that does not exist. Anthropic's counsel at Latham & Watkins explained what had happened: a colleague had found a real supporting source through a search, and Claude was then used to format the citation for it. The link, volume, page numbers and year came back right, and the author and title came back wrong, and the manual check did not catch it. Nobody was sanctioned. It is on this page because of who it happened to: the company whose model it was, represented by one of the largest firms in the world, in a case about that model.

Curated from news.ycombinator.com · 16 April 2025 →

Cursor users started being logged out when they moved between machines. They asked support why, and a bot signing itself Sam told them Cursor was now limited to one active session per subscription. No such policy existed; the logouts were a session bug. Developers work across a laptop and a desktop as a matter of course, so the invented rule read as a product decision aimed at them, and it travelled through Reddit and Hacker News as one before anyone at the company saw it. Some cancelled. This is the reply from a Cursor cofounder in the Hacker News thread. The fix that matters is the first bullet: the answers had not been labelled as machine-written, so nothing about the reply told the reader how much weight to put on it.

Curated from theconversation.com · 15 April 2025 →

Two papers from the 1950s were scanned into a digital archive, and the software running across two columns of text joined vegetative in one column to electron microscopy in the next. That phrase, which means nothing, sat in the scanned corpus, went into Common Crawl, went into the training data, and now appears in more than twenty published papers. GPT-3 completes it; GPT-2 and BERT do not, which is how the researchers dated the contamination. Elsevier initially defended one instance of it. This is the case for keeping the word hallucination at arm's length: nothing was invented here. An error entered a corpus, and the corpus is not something anyone can now edit.

Curated from caselaw.findlaw.com · 24 February 2025 →

A family sued Walmart over a hoverboard they say caught fire and burned down their house. Their lawyers, at Morgan & Morgan, filed motions citing nine cases in January 2025, and eight of them do not exist. One attorney had used the firm's own internal AI platform to produce the citations. On 24 February the court revoked his admission in the case and fined him 3,000 US dollars, and fined the supervising partner and local counsel 1,000 dollars each. The firm itself was not sanctioned, because it had already trained staff not to use the tool that way and had added a verification acknowledgement. It is the sequence worth noting: the policy existed before the filing, and the policy is not what stopped it.

Curated from bbc.com · 13 December 2024 →

Apple Intelligence groups a phone's notifications and summarises them. In December 2024 it summarised a run of BBC alerts as "Luigi Mangione shoots himself", which had not happened, and delivered it under the BBC's name and logo. The other two items in the same summary were accurate. Apple declined to comment at the time and later shipped an update that italicises machine-written summaries and lets a reader switch them off per app, and turned them off for news and entertainment apps entirely while it worked on them. The case is here because of who carried the error: the summary was Apple's, and the masthead on it was somebody else's.

Curated from apnews.com · 26 October 2024 →

Whisper is OpenAI's speech-to-text model, and by late 2024 a product built on it was in use at around 40 health systems and had been through some seven million medical visits. The AP spoke to engineers and researchers who had studied its output and reported that none had seen a transcription tool invent as much: whole sentences that nobody said, appearing most often in the silences, and including invented medications and racial commentary. One study of over 13,000 clean audio clips found hallucinations in 312 of them. The compounding problem in the clinical case is that the vendor deletes the original audio for privacy reasons, so once the note is written there is nothing left to check it against.

Curated from blog.google · 30 May 2024 →

Google put AI Overviews above ordinary results for everyone in the United States on 14 May 2024. Within a week screenshots were circulating of it recommending glue in pizza sauce, sourced from an eleven-year-old Reddit joke, and eating rocks, sourced from an Onion piece a geology software firm had republished. Google's head of Search wrote this account, which is unusually specific about the mechanism: the system was not inventing so much as faithfully summarising the only thing on the web that answered the question. That is the failure mode worth taking away, because it survives better models. Google shipped restrictions on satire and user-generated content in Overviews, and limits on where they appear at all.

Curated from themarkup.org · 29 March 2024 →

New York City launched the MyCity chatbot in October 2023 to help small business owners work out what the rules are. The Markup tested it five months later and found it confidently describing illegal conduct as permitted, in several languages, on housing discrimination, tips, scheduling and funeral pricing. One detail is worth keeping: when a single reporter asked whether landlords must accept housing vouchers, the bot once said yes, but when ten staffers asked the same question it told all ten no. A wrong answer that is not reliably wrong is also not reliably testable. The city left the bot up, labelled as a beta.

Curated from scienceintegritydigest.com · 15 February 2024 →

A review article on stem cells appeared in a Frontiers journal in February 2024 illustrated with Midjourney figures whose labels are not words: protemns for proteins, dissilced, testtomcels. The anatomy in the main figure is not anatomy. The authors had disclosed that the images were generated, one of the two reviewers had flagged problems with the figures, and it was published anyway; Frontiers retracted it three days later. The interesting failure is not the generator, which did what it was asked. It is that a disclosure was made, a reviewer raised it, and the process moved past both, which is what a check looks like when nobody is required to act on it.

Curated from cbc.ca · 14 February 2024 →

Jake Moffatt asked Air Canada's website chatbot about bereavement fares before flying to a funeral in November 2022. The chatbot told him he could book at full price and apply for the bereavement rate within ninety days. Air Canada's actual policy does not allow a retroactive claim, and the airline argued at the tribunal that the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions. On 14 February 2024 the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal found negligent misrepresentation and awarded Moffatt 812.02 Canadian dollars. It is the decision every later chatbot-liability argument is measured against: what your assistant says is what your company said.

Curated from analyticsvidhya.com · 5 February 2024 →

Krutrim opened to a public beta in February 2024 as India's own foundation model, built for Indian languages. Users immediately found the assistant getting Indian facts wrong and, at one point, answering that it had been created by OpenAI. The company's explanation was that an open-source dataset used in fine-tuning had carried that answer in and that the dataset was removed, and its own blog acknowledged hallucinations and a short context window in the beta. Aggarwal said the error rate on Indian contexts would still be lower than the global models. It is on this page as the case closest to home for anyone in this network shipping a model: the specific failure was not the model's reasoning, it was what came in with somebody else's training data.

Curated from abajournal.com · 29 December 2023 →

Cohen, who had been disbarred, was asking for his supervised release to end early. He looked for supporting cases in Google Bard, which he later said in a sworn declaration he had taken for a supercharged search engine, and passed what it produced to his lawyer, David Schwartz. Schwartz put them in the brief without checking, believing another lawyer had supplied them. Judge Jesse Furman found none of the cases exist. He declined to impose sanctions while calling the episode embarrassing and negligent. The chain is the useful part: neither man believed he was the one responsible for verification, because each thought the other had already done it, and the tool sat at a point in the process where nobody had been assigned that job.

Curated from 404media.co · 29 August 2023 →

Several foraging guides on Amazon in 2023 shared formatting, phrasing and invented author biographies, and were sold with no indication of how they were written. The New York Mycological Society warned its members off them. Its president, Sigrid Jakob, put the problem plainly: there are hundreds of poisonous fungi in North America and several are deadly, they resemble popular edible species, and a poor description in a book can send someone to eat the wrong one. Every other hallucination on this page is caught by a reader who knows the subject. A beginner's field guide is bought precisely by somebody who cannot check it, which is what makes this category of generated book different from the rest.