Which AI tool was involved in McCarthy v. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration?

The order in McCarthy v. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration does not identify a specific generative tool by name. The court treated the citations as the product of an unverified AI-assisted drafting workflow.

March 27, 2026 · AI sanctions database

McCarthy v. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

McCarthy v. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration 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: CA Third Circuit
Date: March 27, 2026
Party: Lawyer
AI tool: Not identified in the order
Outcome: Reprimand / professional discipline
Penalty: No monetary penalty in this order.

Professional sanctionWarning

What the record shows

The Third Circuit found that the attorney's opening brief relied on adjudication summaries that were inaccurate and on one cited DEA adjudication that did not exist, which the attorney later admitted had been hallucinated by AI. The court addressed discipline under its Circuit Disciplinary Rules; the majority and a partial dissent debated the appropriate sanction level for violations of Pa. R.P.C. 3.3(a)(1).

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 · CA Third Circuit

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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