AI Risk Wire

Cases › made things up › LR-2026-0436

Judge tosses case over fake AI citations, including references to Fahrenheit 451

Preliminary Why: 1 report: Ars Technica · subject to change · 1 independent report

Status: action reported, no fix

Severity minor
Reported 6 Feb 2026

No source states: loss or records, developer and model, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.

An attorney, Steven Feldman, used AI when drafting court filings in a New York federal case, and some of those filings contained fake citations. When asked to correct the filings, he kept responding with new documents that also contained fake citations. One filing drew the court's notice for its florid prose, including an extended quote from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla found the extraordinary sanctions warranted and terminated the case. The judge suspected AI helped write the filings, but the attorney testified that he wrote every word himself. He said he had read the Bradbury book many years earlier and wanted to include personal things in that filing.

What happened

1 · What it reached or didHe kept responding to requests to correct his filings with documents containing fake citations.

What was done

The judge terminated the case as an extraordinary sanction over the repeated misuse of AI in filings.

Risks

Made-up output relied on
Primary36 incidents

Sorted by rule from the case's fields; not yet read from the sources.

Controls

Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:

Application

Grounding and fact checks · Human approval for high-impact actions · Output filtering and redaction · People told they are dealing with AI

Evidence

No source states: what the AI was doing, what went wrong, how it was caught, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off.

Show the full account: 1 items from the primary sources

What happened, in order

Not dated in the sources:

  • Judge Failla wrote the order finding extraordinary sanctions warranted.
Show every field, with its source and grade

What happened

Earliest source we hold
2026-02-06
D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown
What went wrong
made things up
C one secondary source states it

Impact

Severity
minor
D inferred by us from the described behaviour, reason shown

Context

Country
United States
C one secondary source states it

Notes on gaps

The attorney's denial of AI use comes from the ABA Journal citing Ars Technica, a secondhand report. No remediation is stated.

LR-2026-0436 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON