Enlarge / Michael Cohen, former personal lawyer to US President Donald Trump, arrives at federal court in New York on December 14, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, admitted providing fake AI-generated court citations to his own lawyer, who failed to check whether the cited cases were real before submitting them in a court brief. Cohen said the fake court cases came from Google Bard and that he thought Bard was like “a super‑charged search engine” rather than a generative AI tool.

As previously reported, Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, cited three cases that do not exist in a motion seeking early termination of Cohen’s supervised release. The fake citations were meant to show previous instances in which defendants were allowed to end supervised release early—two involved fictional cocaine distributors and the other an invented tax evader.

The brief provided case numbers, summaries, and ruling dates for the citations, but the judge determined that the cases never happened. Facing punishment for violating federal rules, Schwartz filed an explanation that apologized “for not checking these cases personally before submitting them to the court,” but also blamed “the conduct of his client.”