MyPillow lawyers were sanctioned for a brief with nearly 30 AI-fabricated citations
In the Coomer v. Lindell defamation case, a federal judge in Colorado found nearly thirty defective citations in a brief filed by Mike Lindell's attorneys: cases that did not exist, misquoted authorities, and decisions attributed to the wrong court. Counsel admitted using generative AI and were sanctioned.
One attorney admitted he failed to cite-check the AI-generated authority before filing it, despite understanding his obligations.
Key facts
- What
- In the Coomer v.
- Incident date
- Apr 23, 2025
- Who
- Defense counsel in Coomer v. Lindell
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- High
What happened
In April 2025, U.S. District Judge Nina Wang identified nearly thirty defective citations in a brief filed by attorneys for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, including citations to cases that do not exist. One attorney admitted using generative AI and failing to check the output. The court sanctioned the two attorneys.
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 system produced fluent, confident output with no grounding in any source. Hallucination is a property of how the model generates, not a bug in one prompt: the most likely next token is not the same as the true one, and nothing in the pipeline compared the answer against a source of truth before it shipped.
What it cost
Court sanctions on the attorneys
Sources
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/mypillow-lawyers-sanctioned-brief-nearly-30AI Failure Index. "MyPillow lawyers were sanctioned for a brief with nearly 30 AI-fabricated citations" (FI-0033). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/mypillow-lawyers-sanctioned-brief-nearly-30 (indexed Jun 3, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0033. 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.