Federal · federal court of appeals · 2026
Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, 3 April 2026. What the court wrote about citations that did not exist, in its own words, from 2 documents on file.
Case record · 6th Cir.
Retrieved · the text below was read from the source documents on that day.
The passages in which the court addresses the fabricated authority, verbatim, by document. A bracketed ellipsis marks where a passage was cut for length; nothing else is changed.
3.130(5.3) (2022). That Howe’s briefs cited real legal authorities —as opposed to “hallucinations” featuring fictitious cases—does not absolve him. See Sanders v.
Cl. 163, 169 & n.8 (2025) (collecting cases with invented authorities). Howe’s failure to verify the artificial-intelligence output still resulted in the submission of false quotations and misleading legal arguments to this Court.
Docket text. PER CURIAM PUBLISHED OPINION. Eric L. Clay, Julia Smith Gibbons, and Whitney D. Hermandorfer, Circuit Judges.--[Edited 04/03/2026 by LAW] (LAW) [Entered: 04/03/2026 01:57 PM]
3.130(5.3) (2022). That Howe’s briefs cited real legal authorities —as opposed to “hallucinations” featuring fictitious cases—does not absolve him. See Sanders v.
Cl. 163, 169 & n.8 (2025) (collecting cases with invented authorities). Howe’s failure to verify the artificial-intelligence output still resulted in the submission of false quotations and misleading legal arguments to this Court.
Pattern matches on the documents' text. Each line is a fact that the text contains the words, not a finding about the case.
This page is a record, not legal advice. It quotes the documents on file and lists what their text mentions. Read the decision at the source before relying on it, and check whether a later order changed it.
More from Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, from Federal, or from 2026. The whole record is at court decisions on AI-hallucinated citations.
Every case in this record shares one cause: a citation reached a court without anyone opening it. What a citation gate is explains the mechanism that makes that impossible by construction; how to check an AI citation in five minutes is the manual version; the sanctions record is the essay this table grew out of.