Newly disclosed court documents reveal that Michael Cohen, former President Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney and fixer, admitted to unintentionally providing his attorney with fabricated legal citations that were generated by Google Bard, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) program designed to mimic human conversation.
In a recent hearing, U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman raised doubts about three fake case citations that were created by the AI program and provided by Cohen to his attorney in a motion to end his supervised release early.
In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion and campaign finance violations:
Cohen wrote in a sworn declaration unsealed Friday that he has not kept up with “emerging trends (and related risks)” in legal technology and was not aware that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could create citations and descriptions that “looked real but actually were not.” He instead believed the service to be a “supercharged search engine.”
He also said that as a “non-lawyer,” he trusted his counsel, David Schwartz, to vet any suggestions he made before incorporating them into his filing.
“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,” Cohen wrote.
In his order directing Schwartz to produce evidence the cases were real, Furman suggested the lawyer could face sanctions. Cohen defended his lawyer in his declaration, asserting the error was an “honest mistake.”
During his testimony in Trump's $250 million fraud suit, Cohen's documented propensity for dishonesty was heavily criticized.
Cohen's reputation will continue to be an issue as Trump's other legal matters progress. He is already expected to be the star witness in the criminal case against Trump in New York.
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