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- Lawyers in a federal layoff case have apologized after artificial intelligence-generated “fake citations” appeared in a court filing.
- Attorney Jason Graves said he used Anthropic’s Claude Console under “tight time constraints.”
- The filing arose from a dispute over a subpoena related to FEMA layoffs that was challenged in federal court.
A federal court battle over layoffs in Donald Trump’s administration has become the latest example of an artificial intelligence hallucination to enter the courtroom after lawyers admitted to submitting fabricated quotes generated by artificial intelligence.
In an advertisement foot On Friday, attorney Jason Graves admitted that the filing included fake quotes created after Anthropic’s Claude Console was used to help prepare the motion.
“Due to time constraints, I used a siled, enterprise-level data AI platform, Cloud Console, to create a rough draft of the motion. That was a mistake,” Graves wrote. “On the morning of May 6, I sent the draft to my co-counsel, with explicit verbal instructions that the draft came from the AI, and I needed to carefully examine the citations. That afternoon, the lawyer informed me that she had reviewed and verified each citation.”
According to Greaves, the colleague noticed that the two cases mentioned were incorrect, but she found a different case to cite.
“As the supervising partner and signatory to the plea, the responsibility for obtaining accurate quotations rests entirely with me,” Graves added. “I take full responsibility for this and fully apologize to the court, and to all attorneys in this case, for the fictitious citations that appeared in the lawsuit. I have also personally apologized to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.”
Launched in March 2023 as Anthropic Developer Console, Claude Console is Anthropic’s enterprise platform for interacting with its Claude AI models, which companies and professionals use to draft, summarize, code, and research documents.
This case adds to a growing list of courtroom disputes related to artificial intelligence. In April, the attorneys were with the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell punished After submitting fake legal citations generated by artificial intelligence.
This latest controversy over AI hallucinations stems from lawsuits filed against the Trump administration over mass federal layoffs and proposed changes to protect the civil service. The lawsuit involves disputes related to FEMA staffing reductions and testimony from former Homeland Security official Joseph Guy, whose lawyers filed the request.
“Although the cases cited may have generally supported our position, I acknowledge the inexcusable error of allowing fictitious citations to be included,” Graves wrote.
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