Was Lnu v. Blanche sanctioned over AI-generated citations?

Lnu v. Blanche (9th Cir., June 3, 2026) is a documented matter involving citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The recorded outcome was: Monetary penalty: $2,500 per attorney; 6-month suspension from the court; State Bar referral. $2,500 in monetary penalties.

Which AI tool was involved in Lnu v. Blanche?

The order in Lnu v. Blanche does not identify a specific generative tool by name. The court treated the citations as the product of an unverified AI-assisted drafting workflow.

June 3, 2026 · AI sanctions database

Lnu v. Blanche

Lnu v. Blanche is one matter in the Veritas record of US court proceedings involving AI-generated citations that could not be verified against the reporters named. The summary below is drawn from the underlying court document, linked at the foot of this page.

Court: 9th Cir.
Date: June 3, 2026
Party: Lawyer
AI tool: Not identified in the order
Outcome: Monetary penalty: $2,500 per attorney; 6-month suspension from the court; State Bar referral
Penalty: $2,500 in monetary penalties.

FineSuspensionProfessional sanctionBar referral

What the record shows

The Ninth Circuit panel imposed sanctions on attorneys Sethi and Rounds, whose briefs contained nonexistent cases, misattributed quotations, and misrepresentations of real cases that the panel attributed to generative AI hallucinations. The panel held the violation occurred at the point of signing and filing, ordered each attorney to pay $2,500 to the Clerk, suspended each from practice before the court for six months, imposed a two-year certification requirement on future filings, and directed the Clerk to serve the order on the State Bar of California.

This entry reflects the court document as filed. The citations at issue could not be located in the reporters named at the time of the order. The reading here is descriptive of the public record and is not legal advice.

Source documents

Primary court document ↗

The test this filing did not run

Every matter in this record shares one mechanism: a citation that did not resolve to an opinion in the reporter named, in a brief that was filed before any verification step ran. Veritas runs that step. The Filing Risk Scanner extracts each citation, resolves it against reporter and public-record sources, and returns a verdict on each one — located, partial, or not located in reporter — before the brief is signed.

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Filed under · AI sanctions database · 9th Cir.

About this publication

Veritas is a pre-filing citation verification platform for law firms and in-house counsel. Every post on the audit log is written by the Veritas editorial team and cross-checked against the underlying sanctions order, standing order, or published opinion it references. Reporter citations are read in their named volumes. Quotations from court orders are checked against the docket.

The product was built by Andrew Zoll, founder of Veritas, who tracks generative AI sanctions in federal and state courts and turns each documented failure mode into verification logic the scanner runs. Veritas was built after the canonical Mata v. Avianca sanctions order made the verification gap a published failure mode of the bar.

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