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.

In the filing, Cohen wrote that he had not kept up with "emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not." To him, he said, Google Bard seemed to be a "supercharged search engine."

Jack Krawczyk discusses how Google Bard helps users connect and communicate -- and what the future holds for the platform. Michael Cohen, former President Trump's onetime fixer and lawyer, admitted in a filing unsealed Friday that he inadvertently gave his lawyer fake legal case citations generated by artificial intelligence in connection with a motion to end his supervised release early. U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman previously called the citations into question, writing earlier this month, "In the letter brief, Mr. Cohen asserts that, "[a]s recently as 2022, there have been District Court decisions, affirmed by the Second Circuit Court, granting early termination of supervised release." Furman added, "As far as the Court can tell, none of these cases exist." Cohen said in his sworn declaration released Friday that he had found the phony citations through Google Bard, an AI service that he said he thought was a "supercharged" search engine. Michael Cohen admitted to inadvertently citing fake legal cases in a motion to end his early release in a sworn declaration released Friday. "As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not," Cohen said. "Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online." In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to tax evasion, campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, spending more than a year in prison before he was put on supervised release. He was also disbarred as a lawyer. "It did not occur to me then and remains surprising to me now--that Mr. Schwartz would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed," he added, citing his lawyer David Schwartz. "I deeply regret any problems Mr. Schwartz's filing may have caused." He said Schwartz's alleged mistake was "a product of inadvertence, not any intent to deceive." E. Danya Perry, who represents Cohen and discovered the citations were fake, told the judge, "Mr.