California lawyer fined $10,000 for ChatGPT-fabricated citations
Sep 2025
Los Angeles attorney Amir Mostafavi became the first California lawyer sanctioned for AI-generated legal fabrications when a court hit him with a $10,000 fine. He ran his appeal draft through ChatGPT to improve the writing but did not verify the output before filing, unaware the tool had inserted fabricated case citations.
Incident Details
Perpetrator:AI writing assistant misuse
Severity:Facepalm
Blast Radius:Client's case compromised; lawyer faces historic fine; AI citation fabrications now surging from few per month to several per day