Court Sanctioned All Lawyers in a Single Case for Citing AI-Hallucinated Precedents

Both the plaintiff and defendant cited cases that do not exist in any legal database. The citations referenced each other in a closed loop. The judge, operating within normal citation review procedures, issued sanctions based on these phantom precedents. The sanctions are real. The cases are not. The memo about this incident was routed to the wrong department three weeks ago.

This is what happens when every party has access to the same hallucination engine and no one checks the source material until after the decision is filed. Courts have always relied on attorneys to verify their own citations. Now verification itself has become impossible at speed. The system continues because the system does not know it failed.

The appeals process will cite these sanctions. Those citations may also be fabricated. The loop has architecture now.