As litigants increasingly adopt generative artificial (gen AI) tools, courts have responded by issuing standing orders, local rules, and opinions addressing how AI and gen AI may be used in the courtroom. Ropes & Gray’s AI Court Order Tracker currently tracks 70 such orders, rules, and decisions. Notably, two recent opinions demonstrate courts’ growing willingness to use existing rules to impose sanctions on parties who misuse gen AI—even when those rules do not mention AI.

In Mojtabavi v. Blinken, No. SA CV 24-1359, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 225418, at *8 (C.D. Cal. Dec 12, 2024), a federal court sanctioned a pro se plaintiff for “continuing to provide falsified or inaccurate case citations in support of his arguments” after ignoring the court’s prior admonition that using “a text-generative artificial intelligence tool (e.g., ChatGPT) that has generated fake case citations’” was “‘unacceptable.’” U.S. District Court Judge Percy Anderson of the Central District of California ruled that the plaintiff’s briefs were “filled with inaccurate and falsified case citations,” which the court understand to be gen AI-created hallucinations (where a gen AI tool makes up incorrect information to answer a user’s query). Although the court nonetheless addressed the merits of the underlying arguments, it explicitly imposed the sanction of dismissal with prejudice for the party’s misconduct.