Judge won't sanction Michael Cohen for citing fake cases in AI-generated legal filing

Michael Cohen will not face sanctions after he cited fake legal cases in a court filing generated by artificial intelligence, a federal judge said Wednesday. Cohen, former President Trump's onetime fixer and lawyer, had pleaded guilty to tax and campaign finance violations and is currently under supervised release. He has repeatedly sought to have his sentence reduced, and in his most recent attempt, Cohen provided his attorney with fabricated case citations he later admitted were generated by Google's AI chatbot, formerly known as Bard. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman said the false citations were "embarrassing and certainly negligent" in a 13-page order that denied Cohen's fourth motion for early termination of supervised release. But the judge found that Cohen, who had said he misunderstood how AI works and did not intend to cite fake cases, had not acted in "bad faith" and that neither he nor his lawyer, David Schwartz, should be sanctioned.