AI hallucination causes court apology

Sullivan & Cromwell told a federal bankruptcy judge that artificial intelligence put fake and inaccurate legal citations into a court filing, and the firm apologized on April 18. (abovethelaw.com) The filing was an April 9 emergency motion in the Chapter 15 bankruptcy case of Prince Global Holdings Ltd. in the Southern District of New York, before Chief Judge Martin Glenn. Andrew Dietderich, co-head of the firm’s restructuring practice, said the motion contained inaccurate citations and other errors listed in a correction schedule. (pacermonitor.com, abovethelaw.com) Dietderich wrote that the errors included artificial intelligence “hallucinations,” meaning invented citations, misquoted authorities, or nonexistent legal sources. He said the firm’s artificial intelligence policies “were not followed” and its citation-review process also missed errors that may have come from manual mistakes. (abovethelaw.com, news.bloomberglaw.com) The mistakes were spotted by lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner, the opposing firm in the case. Bloomberg Law reported that Sullivan & Cromwell filed a redlined correction on April 18, and the American Bar Association Journal said the error list ran about three pages and roughly three dozen items. (news.bloomberglaw.com, abajournal.com) The case sits inside a larger fight over Prince Global, a group of British Virgin Islands entities tied to Cambodian businessman Chen Zhi. The Justice Department said in October 2025 that Chen was charged in Brooklyn with wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy tied to alleged scam compounds in Cambodia. (news.bloomberglaw.com, justice.gov) Courts have been seeing more filings with made-up citations since generative artificial intelligence tools spread through legal work. Damien Charlotin’s database of cases where courts addressed hallucinated material said it had identified 1,333 matters as of its April 20, 2026 update. (damiencharlotin.com) Sullivan & Cromwell told the court it re-reviewed all other filings in the Prince Global matter and found no other artificial intelligence-related errors. The firm said it was reviewing what happened and whether its internal training and review processes need changes. (abovethelaw.com, news.bloomberglaw.com) The apology landed because the errors were not in a student brief or a solo filing, but in papers from one of Wall Street’s best-known firms in a live federal case. In his letter, Dietderich told Judge Glenn that he took responsibility for the failure to ensure the filing was accurate. (abajournal.com, abovethelaw.com)