AI incident ·
Four Lawyers Reportedly Sanctioned After Purportedly AI-Related Hallucinated Citations Appeared in Withers v. City of Aberdeen
In brief
An AI system built by Large Language Model Developers, First Drafts and 1 other and deployed by Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway, Mark Mcclinton and 3 others allegedly harmed Tom Withers Iii, Judicial Integrity and 2 others.
- Risk domain
- Not classified
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 1 report
What happened
In Withers v. City of Aberdeen, a federal judge in Mississippi reportedly sanctioned four lawyers after filings from both sides contained purportedly hallucinated legal citations linked to unverified AI use. The court said Kathleen Wilson used First Drafts to draft a filing and Kathryn Williams used an AI legal-research tool; all four attorneys were removed from the case and fined.
Laws that address this harm
No recorded instrument yet addresses this use case where it happened. See the open queue.
Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (1)
Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Shauncey Hunter Ridgeway, Mark Mcclinton, Lawyers, Kathryn Y. Williams, Kathleen M. Wilson
- Alleged harmed party
- Tom Withers Iii, Judicial Integrity, Epistemic Integrity, City Of Aberdeen Mississippi
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
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- Risk subdomain
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- Causal entity
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Source record: incident #1533 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report