What happened
In a big lawsuit over mass layoffs in the US federal government, lawyers for a former Homeland Security official filed papers asking the court to block a subpoena.
One of the lawyers, Jason Greaves of Binnall Law Group, had used Anthropic’s Claude to write the filing because of “tight time constraints.” The cases it pointed to were real. But some of the quotes it gave from those cases were not in them.
On 16 May 2026, three of the firm’s lawyers apologised to Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco.
Why it went wrong
Greaves said he checked the cases in general but “did not double check the quotations.” He called it “the inexcusable error of allowing the inclusion of phantom quotations.” AI tools can produce quotes that sound exactly like a judge, even when the judge never wrote them.
Impact
- A public apology in a high-profile case, and damage to the firm’s name.
- The firm said it has set AI rules and will train staff to check documents and sources.
The lesson
- Check every quote word for word. Finding the right case is not enough. The words must be in it.
- Rushing is when mistakes get through. Time pressure is the reason given in almost every one of these cases.
- Professionals get no pass. Lawyers are responsible for every word they file, whoever or whatever wrote it.