AI-hallucinated citations delay wage class action settlement in N.D. Cal
A federal judge in the Northern District of California sanctioned plaintiff's counsel in Buchanan v. Dollar Tree (Case 5:23-cv-01121-NC) for filing AI-generated case law citations in a motion for preliminary approval of a wage and hour class action settlement. After the court flagged the fabricated citations, the attorney submitted a corrected filing that still contained AI-hallucinated case law. The sanctions delayed the entire class action settlement, harming the plaintiffs the attorney was supposed to represent.
Incident Details
Perpetrator:AI chatbot
Severity:Facepalm
Blast Radius:Class action plaintiffs whose settlement was delayed; attorney sanctioned for AI-generated fabrications that persisted even after correction
Tech Stack
Generative AI (unspecified)