The Ninth Circuit fines two lawyers $2,500 each and suspends them for six months over AI-hallucinated briefs — but the sanction is for candor, not for using AI

Verification status: PENDING — publish-ready, awaiting human client-confirmation. Not verified.

The problem

An immigration petition for review reached the Ninth Circuit (Lnu, et al. v. Blanche, No. 24-4790 — petitioners sought review of a Board of Immigration Appeals order dismissing their asylum, withholding-of-removal, and Convention Against Torture claims). Petitioners’ counsel Mike Singh Sethi filed an opening brief “with multiple fabricated citations and quotations.” Sethi “cited two cases that do not exist and never existed” — “Eduardo v. Garland, 28 F.4th 742 (9th Cir. 2022),” and “Lay v. Holder, 729 F.3d 962 (9th Cir. 2013)” — and “twice attributed quotations to real opinions in which the quoted language does not appear.” When the fabrications surfaced, the attorneys called them “typographical errors” and repeatedly denied that generative AI had produced them.

What was built

No system was built or deployed here. This is an AI-governance honest-negative: a federal appeals court’s response to unverified generative-AI output submitted as law. The panel (Judges Richard A. Paez, Carlos T. Bea, and Danielle J. Forrest; Order “For Publication,” filed June 3, 2026) found the fabrications and inaccuracies “were the result of hallucinations by generative AI” — but was careful to say it was not sanctioning the mere use of AI. “The rules are not violated at the point of research and drafting, but at the point of signing and filing,” the panel wrote; “if an attorney files a brief with cases or quotations that do not exist … the rules are violated.” The order names no specific AI product.

The outcome

Acting “under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 46(b) and Ninth Circuit Rule 46-2,” the panel ordered that “Sethi and Rounds are each personally sanctioned in the amount of $2,500” — $5,000 combined, payable to “Clerk, US Courts” within 21 days — and that “Sethi and Rounds are hereby suspended from practice before this Court for a period of six months starting ten days after this Order is filed.” It further required, for two years, that all Firm filings disclose under penalty of perjury whether generative AI was used, name the tool, and certify personal verification of every citation and quotation, and it directed the Clerk to serve the order on the California State Bar. Critically, the discipline turned on conduct after the filing: the attorneys “knowingly or recklessly made false statements to this Court” by characterizing the nonexistent cases as typographical slips, and “the gravity of discipline we impose, including the temporary suspension of practice, is owed to this repeated failure of candor.”

Path to green

Every figure is established by the published order and needs no client call. The open items are docket- and State-Bar-only, asserted by no claim: whether Sethi and Rounds paid the $2,500 each within 21 days, whether the six-month suspensions were served, and any California State Bar follow-on discipline. A green badge — if TIN carries court-adjudicated honest-negatives — would be a human confirming that docket posture; the sanction and the quotes are already verifiable from the primary.