AIFoPa-2026-0028 — The Apology Required a Further Apology
On 3 June 2025 the Crown Prosecution Service prepared grounds of opposition in two linked appeals against orders for extradition to Romania. The document argued, among other things, for the continuing application of the reasoning in Pilecki, and it offered in support of that argument two decisions of the Administrative Court: Vlad v Romania [2017] EWHC 2060 (Admin) and Jeziorski v Poland [2019] EWHC 3885 (Admin). The citations are of the correct form. The years are plausible, the neutral citation numbers are of the right magnitude, the requesting states are the ones a reader would expect. Mr Justice Sweeting, handing down judgment on 8 July 2026 in Andreea-Maria Tobosaru v Court of Law Craiova, Romania [2026] EWHC 1720 (Admin), dispensed with the matter in five words. “Neither of these authorities exists.”
They were not caught at the permission stage. They were carried forward, unaltered, into a further document — the respondent’s submissions in the appeal — so that by the time anybody looked at them properly they had been put before the High Court twice by the national prosecuting authority of England and Wales. The Bureau notes, as it is obliged to, that a fabricated citation which survives one reading is an error, and a fabricated citation which survives two is a procedure.
The CPS accepts that the citations were inaccurate and that they were likely to have originated from the use of generative artificial intelligence in legal research. Its account of the causal chain is precise and the Bureau reproduces it because the precision is the interesting part: the operative cause, the service says, was human error in the failure to verify the authorities relied upon — the reviewing lawyer did not properly check the accuracy of the document. This is, so far as the Bureau can establish, entirely true. It is also a description of a machine writing two case names and a person not reading them, rendered in such a way that only the second half of the sentence has an agent in it.
What raises the file above the ordinary run of hallucinated-citation records is what happened next. The CPS wrote to the court to apologise, and in doing so told the court that the error had not been identified by the respondents but had been drawn to their attention by counsel for the appellants. That was not so. Junior counsel instructed for the respondents had also been unable to find the two authorities and had raised the matter with the CPS independently, shortly before those acting for the appellants did. The service accordingly made a further apology for this error, which is to say an apology for the account it had given while apologising, and the Bureau — which is required by its own standing instructions to file the earliest identifiable point of failure — observes that the correction ran in the more flattering direction and had to be corrected back.
An internal review followed. The CPS examined nearly eighty other cases conducted by the same lawyer, found no similar issue in any of them, and assessed that lawyer’s work as being of a good standard; it concluded that the risk of recurrence was low and reinforced its verification processes. The two appeals were dismissed on their merits. The fictitious authorities played no part in the reasoning, and Sweeting J accepted the apology and found no attempt to mislead. The Bureau records all of this in full because an incident with no casualty is still an incident, and because seventy-eight or so files were opened, read and closed by human beings in order to establish that a machine had done this only once.
The judge’s own observation is filed here as the finding of record. It would be naive, he said, to assume that there will not be an increasing use of artificial intelligence in legal work in future, and such use may be both necessary and beneficial; but the episode highlights the risks of its use without appropriate oversight, particularly for legal research. The Bureau, which has now filed enough of these to have opinions it is not permitted to hold, appends only this: the two decisions did not exist on 3 June 2025 and do not exist today, and in the interval they were cited to the High Court of England and Wales, relied upon by the prosecution, transcribed into a second document, apologised for once, mis-described in the apology, and apologised for again. At no stage did anybody open them. There was nothing to open.
G-7 / Personal Annotation / Not For Official Record
The Registry declined the amended filing on the ground that Form AIFoPa-COR-001 — Correction to the Record — may not be submitted in respect of a document which is itself a Form AIFoPa-COR-001, this being, in the words of the guidance note, “an arrangement with no natural terminus.” Grantham-7 has read the guidance note. He agrees with it. He has also read the Bureau’s file on the present matter, in which the arrangement is observed reaching its natural terminus after two iterations, at a cost of one letter, and he has begun to suspect that the guidance note is describing a fear rather than a phenomenon.
He has left the second correction unfiled, in the drawer, where it does not exist. It joins Vlad and Jeziorski. The Plant has been moved nearer the window, which was not related, but which he mentions because the record of this week is otherwise entirely negative in character and he would like one item in it that happened.
— G-7