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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can eliminate humanity according to a recent research paper by scientists at Google and the University of Oxford. In the paper which was published in the journal AI Magazine, the team -- comprised of DeepMind senior scientist Marcus Hutter and Oxford researchers Michael Cohen and Michael Osborne -- concluded that the answer to the long-standing question of whether a super-intelligent AI may go rogue and wipe out humans was that it was "likely". "Under the conditions we have identified, our conclusion is much stronger than that of any previous publication -- an existential catastrophe is not just possible, but likely," Cohen tweeted earlier this month. Bostrom, Russell, and others have argued that advanced AI poses a threat to humanity. We reach the same conclusion in a new paper in AI Magazine, but we note a few (very plausible) assumptions on which such arguments depend.

Donald Trump has a lot more to worry about than just Robert Mueller. That much has been clear since April, when details began to emerge from public court filings regarding the FBI raid on Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a number of criminal charges, including some stemming from his work for Trump. Instead, it was carried out by FBI agents acting in coordination with Robert S. Khuzami, a deputy U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. Mueller had referred the Cohen case to Khuzami's office, but that was as far as his involvement apparently went. As I wrote at the time, the distribution of the investigation to a second office served to "potentially inoculate [it] from Trump's attacks against Mueller and potential meddling in the broader Russia investigation." Samuel W. Buell, the former lead Enron prosecutor, told me that would make it much more difficult to kill the investigation with a Saturday Night Massacre–style firing spree.

U.S. federal prosecutors asked for the right to use AI to sort through the documents removed from Michael Cohen's office in a five-page request to a judge, according to a story in MIT Technology Review. According to CNN, prosecutors are investigating Cohen, the personal attorney for the President, for his payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her alleged affair with Trump out of the news. The FBI also is reviewing emails, tax documents and business records, including communications between Trump and Cohen, for potential fraud. The court appointed Barbara Jones, an independent attorney and retired judge, to review the documents to decide what qualifies as "privileged" material, which will be excluded, according to The Wall Street Journal. The five prosecutors asked for "Technology Assisted Review," or TAR to sort through the files a few days after the seizure.