AIBRIEF
A Quebec court ordered a man representing himself to pay his ex wife $1,000 CAD (about $730 USD) after he filed four non existent court decisions, two claimed to be from the Supreme Court of Canada.
A Quebec man representing himself in a divorce appeal filed four court decisions that did not exist, after a lawyer had already told him the cases were fake. Two of the four fake cases were attributed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
The man learned the cases did not exist during a consultation with a lawyer, but filed them anyway, according to the Quebec Court of Appeal's Aug. 11, 2026 ruling in A.P. v. S.K., as reported by Global News. He disclosed that ChatGPT had generated the citations only when the bench questioned him at the hearing.
The court found that knowingly filing the fake citations was a serious breach that imposed unnecessary work on the court and on the man's ex-wife in the underlying division-of-assets dispute. The three-judge panel ordered the man to pay his former spouse $1,000 CAD (about $730 USD at recent exchange rates) to compensate her for the time spent responding to a brief built on invented cases, with appeal costs on top.
The ruling sits inside an August 2026 cluster of AI-hallucination sanctions. Damien Charlotin's AI-in-courts log lists comparable rulings in the same week from Brazil's São Paulo court, Nova Scotia's Court of Appeal, and two U.S. federal courts, with cost awards from $1,000 to $20,000 CAD (about $730 to $14,600 USD). The Quebec award sits at the low end of that range and came with no reported bar referral.