AI Risk WireCases › made things up › LR-2026-0835
CPS prosecutor cites AI-hallucinated case law in High Court child rape prosecution hearing
Also listed as: AI lawsuits
Confirmed Why: 2 independent outlets · 2 independent reports
Status: fix reported
No source states: loss or records, developer and model, agent tool, could do, deployer.
Severity moderate: a court proceeding was touched and the judges called the explanation 'unsatisfactory', but the mistake was accepted not to have altered the outcome of the case.
A senior CPS prosecutor, Ravinder Dhillon, was researching a child rape case and used an AI response generated during an internet search. In written submissions to a High Court hearing on whether a child should be prosecuted for the rape of his younger sister, she cited a detailed reference to a case she called CPS – R v J [2024] EWCA Crim 3529, which turned out not to exist. She said her citation had been an error and that she had meant a House of Lords decision from 14 years earlier; two High Court judges called the explanation 'unsatisfactory' but accepted the mistake had not altered the outcome, and the prosecution was allowed to continue. The CPS said it identified the error from legal research using the internet, remedied it, carried out an internal review and shared learnings that caselaw must be cited from trusted legal sources.
What happened
No source tells the story step by step yet.
What was done
“As soon as this error was identified, it was remedied and an internal review was carried out to establish how this had occurred and to check that no other cases have been affected. Following the rapid review we shared learnings, including that caselaw must be cited from trusted legal sources.”
Risks
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Controls
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ApplicationGrounding and fact checks · Human approval for high-impact actions · Output filtering and redaction · People told they are dealing with AI · Drift monitoring
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Evidence
- What was done As soon as this error was identified, it was remedied and an internal review was carried out to establish how this had occurred and to check that no other cases have been affected. Following the rapid review we shared learnings, including that caselaw must be cited from trusted legal sources.
No source states: a step-by-step account, 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.
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Extractor proposed values without quotes; dropped: . The 101-entry UK tracker figure is a count of tracked incidents, not of this incident's impact, and is not used as a quantity field. Extractor proposed values without quotes; dropped: .
LR-2026-0835 · version 1 · published 2026-11-04 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON