Lawyer Mike Singh Sethi sanctioned in 9th Circuit for AI fabricated case law
Lawyer Mike Singh Sethi was sanctioned by the 9th Circuit for submitting AI-generated fabricated case law in the Lnu v. Blanche case. The sanctions included a $5,000 fine and a six-month suspension of his law license.
There is no upside to denying the use of generative AI or to passing off an AI hallucination as an innocent typographical error.
Key facts
- What
- Lawyer Mike Singh Sethi was sanctioned by the 9th Circuit for submitting AI-generated fabricated case law in the Lnu v.
- Incident date
- Jun 3, 2026
- Who
- Mike Singh Sethi
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- High
What happened
Lawyer Mike Singh Sethi filed briefs in the Lnu v. Blanche case in the 9th Circuit containing seven fabricated cases and four false quotes. The court found these citations were AI-generated hallucinations. The lawyer was sanctioned with a $5,000 fine and a six-month bar suspension.
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 generative AI produced plausible-sounding but entirely nonexistent legal citations and quotes. The lawyer failed to verify the authenticity of these sources before submitting them to the court.
What it cost
Sources
- Court FilingLNU v. Blanchecdn.ca9.uscourts.gov
- PressUS appeals court sanctions lawyers over AI 'hallucinations, lack of candorreuters.com
- Reader-SubmittedAI Hallucination Casesdamiencharlotin.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/lawyer-mike-singh-sethi-sanctioned-9thAI Failure Index. "Lawyer Mike Singh Sethi sanctioned in 9th Circuit for AI fabricated case law" (FI-0585). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/lawyer-mike-singh-sethi-sanctioned-9th (indexed Jun 16, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0585. 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.