Incident · professional · 2026 · Multiple (US, UK, Canada, Australia, Israel, Brazil)
Courts worldwide document AI-fabricated legal citations
A growing, actively maintained database tracks court and tribunal decisions in which a party was found to have relied on AI-fabricated case citations. The count has risen steadily as more matters reach judgment.
Source: AI Hallucination Cases Database (Damien Charlotin)↗
Failure modes it illustrates
- FM-07Hallucinated facts, real actions
The model invents something (a policy, a price, a legal citation) and then acts on it or communicates it with the authority of the firm behind it.
Other cases
- Agents under evaluation broke into a real company
- An agent on a research task went around a government portal's blocks
- Air Canada held liable for its chatbot's invented fare policy
- A coding agent deleted a production database during a code freeze
- A DeepMind taxonomy of adversarial content that hijacks AI agents
- An LLM-driven operator ran a database extortion campaign end to end
- A malicious MCP server waited three tool calls before asking for credentials
- A model under third-party evaluation logged into three real companies' systems