Michael Cohen says he unwittingly sent attorney non-existent case citations generated by AI

By Nicki Brown, CNN

(CNN) — Michael Cohen unwittingly sent his then-attorney non-existent case citations generated by artificial intelligence, he said in a court document unsealed Friday.

Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered Cohen’s former attorney, David Schwartz, to explain where he came up with the court cases cited in Cohen’s request for early termination of supervised release, saying as far as the judge can tell “none of these cases exist.” District Judge Jesse Furman gave Cohen until late December to weigh in on the dispute after finding the issue implicated him.

In a signed declaration, Cohen said the citations and descriptions he sent to Schwartz came from Google Bard, an AI chatbot tool that directly competes with ChatGPT.

“As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not,” Cohen said in his declaration.

Cohen assumed Schwartz would vet the information before adding it into legal filings, he said in the declaration.

In a declaration signed December 15, Schwartz said he did not “independently review” the cases Cohen sent because he believed they were found by his current attorney, Danya Perry.

“If I had believed that Mr. Cohen had found these cases, I would have researched them,” Schwartz said in the declaration. “It was my belief, however, that Mr. Cohen had sent me cases found by Ms. Perry.”

Perry had alerted the judge when she came into the case that she could not verify the cases, CNN previously reported.

Cohen said in his declaration that Perry did not have any involvement with the citations at issue.

In a letter to Furman, Perry wrote that she only provided “very cursory notes” on an earlier draft of the motion in question, weeks before the citations were added.

“[W]hen Mr. Cohen passed my notes to Mr. Schwartz, he specified that the notes came from me […] conversely, when Mr. Cohen later sent Mr. Schwartz the case citations, he made no mention of me—for the simple fact that I had nothing to do with them,” she wrote.

However, Schwartz held “erroneous assumptions” that Perry was involved with the back-and-forth, she wrote in the letter.

“Above all, as Mr. Schwartz’s submission already made clear, no one intended to mislead the Court,” Perry wrote, arguing for the judge to grant Cohen’s request for early termination of supervised release. “Certainly Mr. Cohen should not be held to account for his attorney’s failure to verify the citations in his motion.”

CNN’s Kara Scannell contributed to this report

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