LLMMedium
Claude Console Reportedly Generated Phantom Legal Quotations in Trump Layoffs Court Filing
- Occurred
- May 6, 2026
- Published
- May 15, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
A Binnall Law Group attorney reportedly used Anthropic's Claude Console to draft a motion to quash a subpoena in litigation over Trump administration layoffs, then filed a version containing "phantom" quotations that did not appear in the cited cases. The attorney apologized to U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, and the firm said it would add safeguards and training after calling the AI-generated errors unacceptable.
Developers
- Anthropic
Deployers
- Binnall Law Group
- Jason Greaves
Harmed parties
- Epistemic integrity
- Judicial integrity
- Joseph Guy
- Parties in Trump administration layoffs
- Parties in American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO v. Trump
Tags
- response
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: AI model hallucinated legal citations in a court filing, causing professional misconduct and apology.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8