The FTC fined the 'robot lawyer' DoNotPay for unsubstantiated AI claims
The FTC charged DoNotPay, which marketed an AI 'robot lawyer' that could replace human attorneys, with making unsubstantiated claims. The company agreed to a settlement, including a penalty and a requirement to warn consumers about the service's limits.
The service was marketed as a robot lawyer that could replace human attorneys, a claim the FTC said was unsubstantiated.
Key facts
- What
- The FTC charged DoNotPay, which marketed an AI 'robot lawyer' that could replace human attorneys, with making unsubstantiated claims.
- Incident date
- Sep 25, 2024
- Who
- DoNotPay
- Failure mode
- Policy Violation
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
In 2024 the FTC alleged that DoNotPay marketed an AI service as a substitute for a human lawyer without testing whether its output matched a lawyer's, and without legal review. DoNotPay settled, agreeing to pay a penalty and to notify subscribers about the limits of its legal products as part of the FTC's AI enforcement sweep.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA prompt pushes against a deployment boundary.
- 02 · Model stepThe model produces the disallowed output.
- 03 · Control gapNo enforcement blocks it at generation time.
- 04 · FailureThe output crosses the policy line.
- 05 · ConsequenceA limit the business set is breached in public.
The output crosses a policy boundary the deployment had defined.
The system produced an output or action that broke a stated company policy or a regulation that applied to the deployment. The model optimized for a plausible response, not for the constraint, and no enforcement layer checked the output against the policy before it took effect.
What it cost
FTC settlement and penalty; required consumer warnings
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/ftc-fined-robot-lawyer-donotpayAI Failure Index. "The FTC fined the 'robot lawyer' DoNotPay for unsubstantiated AI claims" (FI-0055). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/ftc-fined-robot-lawyer-donotpay (indexed Jun 3, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0055. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
Realm compares what the model is about to output or do against the policy that governs the deployment, in real time, and can deny or redact the action before it takes effect, which is the gap an after-the-fact review never closes in time.