A federal judge decided Wednesday that disgraced lawyer Michael Cohen would not face sanctions for submitting an AI-generated legal filing that cited fake cases. Cohen’s ‘fake case’ filing was submitted during his prosecution for tax and campaign finance violations. He is currently under supervised release after pleading guilty to the charges in 2018 and serving one year in prison.
Judge Jesse Furman called Cohen’s use of AI — and the subsequent fake case citations — “embarrassing and certainly negligent.”
However, the U.S. District Court judge added that he believes Cohen’s excuse that he did not fully understand how AI language models function and that the fake case citations were not in “bad faith.” Cohen, once a lawyer for former President Donald Trump, used Google’s AI chatbot, formerly called ‘Bard,’ to generate the filing.
“The Court has no basis to question Cohen’s representation that he believed the cases to be real,” the judge wrote in his decision.
While Cohen avoided additional sanctions over the fake case citations, Judge Furman rejected the disgraced attorney’s plea to terminate his supervised release early. Cohen argued for the termination based on his testimony against Trump during the civil fraud prosecution brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The federal judge described Cohen’s attempt to use the testimony as a means to end the conditions of his release as “perverse.” Further, the judge underscored that Cohen’s supervised release was to serve as further deterrence as the disgraced attorney has continued to evade responsibility for his crimes.
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