Thomas Grant Neusom suspended for two years over AI hallucinated citations
Florida Supreme Court suspended attorney Thomas Grant Neusom for two years due to professional misconduct, with evidence including AI-generated, hallucinated citations in pleadings.
Hallucinated AI citations in pleadings corroborated the pattern of misrepresentation.
Key facts
- What
- Florida Supreme Court suspended attorney Thomas Grant Neusom for two years due to professional misconduct, with evidence including AI-generated, hallucinated citations in pleadings.
- Incident date
- Jan 16, 2025
- Who
- Thomas Grant Neusom
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Search / RAG
- Severity
- High
What happened
The Florida Supreme Court suspended attorney Thomas Grant Neusom from the practice of law for two years. The disciplinary action rests on a broader pattern of professional misconduct, with pleadings containing AI-generated hallucinated citations cited as evidence of misrepresentation to the court. The action underscores the responsibility of attorneys to verify AI outputs before submission to court.
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 attorney relied on a generative AI to generate citations, which appeared plausible but were entirely fictitious. The attorney did not adequately verify these citations against authoritative sources before filing, allowing the hallucinations to be presented as legal authority.
What it cost
Sources
- PrimaryDocuments for Disciplinary Action - The Florida Barfloridabar.org
- PressAI Hallucinations, Sanctions, and Context: What a Florida Disciplinary Case Really Teachesjdsupra.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/thomas-grant-neusom-suspended-two-yearsAI Failure Index. "Thomas Grant Neusom suspended for two years over AI hallucinated citations" (FI-0271). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/thomas-grant-neusom-suspended-two-years (indexed Jun 5, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0271. 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.