FC Carl Zeiss Jena lost its appeal after filing a 73-page AI brief full of fabricated citations
FC Carl Zeiss Jena submitted a 73-page AI-generated appeal to the NOFV-Verbandsgericht challenging a €18,400 fine for fan pyrotechnics. The document contained numerous fictitious court rulings and fabricated legal citations that either did not exist or stated the opposite of what was claimed. The court rejected the appeal and removed only the 20% surcharge, upholding the base fine.
The AI fabricated entire court rulings and legal citations, inventing cases that never existed and misrepresenting real ones as saying the exact opposite of their actual holdings.
Key facts
- What
- FC Carl Zeiss Jena submitted a 73-page AI-generated appeal to the NOFV-Verbandsgericht challenging a €18,400 fine for fan pyrotechnics.
- Incident date
- Aug 1, 2025
- Who
- FC Carl Zeiss Jena
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Copilot
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
FC Carl Zeiss Jena was fined €18,400 plus a 20% surcharge by the NOFV sports court for fan pyrotechnics during a Thüringenderby in Erfurt in April 2025. The club appealed with a 73-page document that presiding judge Fred Kreitlow described as a collection of unverifiable AI hallucinations, containing fabricated court rulings and legal citations that either did not exist or stated the opposite of what the actual rulings said. The Verbandsgericht rejected the appeal, removing the 20% surcharge but upholding the base €18,400 fine. Club managing director Patrick Widera later claimed the document was intended as ironic protest, though the court treated it as a genuine submission that failed to meet minimum formal and substantive requirements.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The AI model generated plausible-sounding but entirely fabricated legal citations and court rulings, a known hallucination failure mode where large language models confidently produce non-existent sources. The club did not verify any of the AI-generated references before submitting the document to the court. The model conflated real publication details with invented legal content, creating citations that appeared authoritative but were completely false.
What it cost
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/fc-carl-zeiss-jena-lost-appealAI Failure Index. "FC Carl Zeiss Jena lost its appeal after filing a 73-page AI brief full of fabricated citations" (FI-0165). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/fc-carl-zeiss-jena-lost-appeal (indexed Jun 4, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0165. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
A runtime layer that watches the model's internal state can flag the moment a model commits to a claim it has no support for, and hold or reroute the response before it reaches a user. Realm reads those signals in real time rather than grading the transcript after the fact.