A federal magistrate judge has recommended $15,000 in sanctions be imposed on an attorney who cited non-existent court cases concocted by an AI chatbot.

In a report [PDF] filed last week, Mark J. Dinsmore, US Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of Indiana, recommends that attorney Rafael Ramirez, of Rio, Hondo, Texas, be "sanctioned $15,000 for his violations in this case – $5,000 for each of the three briefs filed by Mr Ramirez where he failed to appropriately verify the validity and accuracy of the case law he cited to the court and opposing counsel."

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"Transposing numbers in a citation, getting the date wrong, or misspelling a party's name is an error," the judge wrote.

"Citing to a case that simply does not exist is something else altogether. Mr Ramirez offers no hint of an explanation for how a case citation made up out of whole cloth ended up in his brief. The most obvious explanation is that Mr Ramirez used an AI-generative tool to aid in drafting his brief and failed to check the citations therein before filing it."

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