The first Trump lawyer domino to fall, Michael Cohen accidentally gave his lawyers fake cases created by artificial intelligence to cite in his effort to end his probation that ended up included in court filings, a letter from the firm to Federal Judge Jesse Furman details. In an effort to assist his lawyers, Cohen reportedly scoured the internet for relevant case law and thought he found a number of cases on point.
“The invalid citations at issue—and many others that Mr. Cohen found but were not used in the motion—were produced by Google Bard, which Mr. Cohen misunderstood to be a supercharged search engine, not a generative AI service like Chat-GPT,” Cohen’s lawyers wrote more than two weeks after Furman issued an order for Cohen’s attorneys to support the bogus cases in the earlier submission.
Cohen was the first of Trump’s lawyers convicted of a crime, having played the middleman and bag man for Donald Trump to pay off Stormy Daniels, a porn performer with whom Trump has a short sexual relationship.