What courts have actually held about deepfakes and fabricated evidence

20 of 20 cases, most recent first.

1. 2026-08-25 United States v. Steven Anderegg (7th Cir. 2026) Because the AI-generated images charged against Anderegg depict no actual child, Stanley v. Georgia and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition bar prosecuting him under 18 U.S.C. section 1466A(b)(1) for possessing that obscene material in his own home. Criminal Read →
2. 2026-07-15 Dineen/Shibata v. Kotchka (Ariz. Ct. App. 2026) A self-represented Arizona litigant who files an opening brief containing hallucinated case citations produced by generative AI, and who does nothing to verify them and nothing to correct the brief once the problem is identified, both asserts and maintains claims that are groundless and not made in good faith under A.R.S. section 12-349, and neither his lack of legal training nor his lack of intent to deceive is a defence. Sanctions Read →
3. 2026-07-10 Estate of Lane Caviness v. Atlas Air, Inc. (11th Cir. 2026) A lawyer who signs Eleventh Circuit briefs filled with AI-generated citations to nonexistent cases, and who then purports to withdraw the wrong set of citations and hallucinates the replacements too, violates his professional obligations to his clients and to the court and will be referred to the circuit's Committee on Lawyer Qualifications and Conduct. Sanctions Read →
4. 2026-04-21 In re María V. Irizarry Centeno; Anissa M. Bonilla Irizarry (P.R. 2026) Filing court papers containing non-existent or misattributed citations produced with technological assistance is sanctionable conduct in Puerto Rico under Canons 18, 35, and 38 and Rule 9.1 of the Rules of Civil Procedure, but where the lawyers have no disciplinary history, corrected the record promptly, and paid the trial court's sanction, the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico may admonish them and archive the complaint rather than discipline them. Sanctions Read →
5. 2026-03-23 Jigsaw Productions, Inc. v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (D.D.C. 2026) A federal agency cannot satisfy the Freedom of Information Act's foreseeable harm requirement by asserting that a released recording could be manipulated into deepfakes, at least where the subject is an exceptionally public figure who is already a frequent deepfake target and the agency shows no concrete reason why one more recording would actually impede his privacy interests. Civil Read →
6. 2026-03-20 Prososki v. Regan (Neb. 2026) Submitting fictitious authority to a Nebraska court is resolved under the existing rules of professional conduct and court rules whether or not generative AI produced it, and a brief riddled with fabricated citations may be stricken, the appeal dismissed, and counsel referred to the Counsel for Discipline. Sanctions Read →
7. 2026-02-17 Matter of M.S. (M.H.) (N.Y. Ct. App. 2026) The New York Court of Appeals held that Erie County failed to authenticate three videos under People v Patterson where neither the person who allegedly recorded them nor the third party who extracted and supplied them testified, and it reasoned that the increasing prevalence of deepfake videos makes authentication by matching circumstantial details in a video to a witness's personal observations a more suspect method. Authentication Read →
8. 2026-02-10 State v. Dore (Conn. App. Ct. 2026) Connecticut's second degree child pornography statute is not overbroad, because General Statutes section 53a-193 (13) limits it to depictions of real children, and the state need not present expert testimony to prove that an image depicts a real child; a defendant arguing that AI-generated imagery has made lay identification unreliable must put evidence of that technology into the record. Criminal Read →
9. 2026-01-28 State of Iowa v. Max Amyda (Iowa Ct. App. 2026) The Iowa Court of Appeals held that a digital video may be authenticated under Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.901(b)(4) entirely on circumstantial evidence of its distinctive contents and the surrounding circumstances, and that a defendant's speculative claim that the video is a deepfake, unsupported by any record evidence, does not raise a genuine question about the original's authenticity under Iowa Rule of Evidence 5.1003. Authentication Read →
10. 2026-01-27 Cassata v. Michael Macrina Architect, P.C. (N.Y. Sup. Ct., Suffolk Cty. 2026) A lawyer who copies another lawyer's brief into her own papers adopts its fabricated citations as her own, and under 22 NYCRR 130-1.1 the supervising attorney and the firm may be sanctioned alongside her where firm-level safeguards did not reach the conduct and no one corrected the record promptly. Sanctions Read →
11. 2026-01-08 Pennington v. First Hand Land, LLC (D.C. Ct. App. 2026) Submitting a blatantly forged court order as a basis for relief is conduct utterly inconsistent with the orderly administration of justice, and the District of Columbia Court of Appeals will dismiss the appeal outright where discipline is unavailable, monetary sanctions are unrealistic or inadequate, and merely disregarding the forgery would leave the forger no worse off. Civil Read →
12. 2025-09-12 Noland v. Land of the Free, L.P. (Cal. Ct. App. 2025) No brief or other paper filed in any California court should contain a citation, whether supplied by generative AI or any other source, that the attorney responsible for filing it has not personally read and verified, and an appeal whose briefs are peppered with fabricated citations is frivolous and supports a personal monetary sanction on counsel. Sanctions Read →
13. 2025-05-09 Bradley Day and Tracey Day v. Elvis Dean Thompson (La. 2025) A Louisiana trial court cannot perform the La. C.E. art. 607(D)(2) balancing test on surveillance video without first reviewing the video in camera, and because artificial intelligence and modern editing have greatly increased the risk of manipulation, the party filmed must have a meaningful opportunity to assess the authenticity of and any weaknesses in the footage. Civil Read →
14. 2025-03-27 Brasse v. State (Md. App. Ct. 2025) Maryland's child pornography statute is not facially overbroad, because section 11-208 reaches only images of an actual child and computer-generated images, including deepfakes, that are indistinguishable from an actual and identifiable child, and a defendant challenging it must show that it prohibits a substantial amount of protected speech. Criminal Read →
15. 2025-03-26 League of Women Voters of New Hampshire v. Kramer (D.N.H. 2025) The District of New Hampshire held that an AI voice-cloned robocall telling voters that casting a primary ballot would waste their general election vote plausibly pleads an attempt to intimidate, threaten or coerce under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, and that robocall vendors who did not write the message may still face Telephone Consumer Protection Act liability if they were so involved in placing the calls, or knowingly allowed their platform to be used unlawfully, as to be deemed to have initiated them. Election Read →
16. 2025-02-28 State v. Currie (Ohio Ct. App., 1st Dist. 2025) The Ohio First District held that a probation officer relying on a social media photograph to establish reasonable grounds for a probation search is not required to authenticate the image or rule out digital manipulation, where the probationer offered no account of how such authentication could be performed and reasonable suspicion does not demand that innocent explanations be eliminated. Authentication Read →
17. 2025-02-12 United States v. Clint Robert Schram (8th Cir. 2025) A jury may determine from the images themselves that advertised child sexual abuse material depicts real children, and the government need not produce evidence to negate a defendant's speculative assertion that the children depicted were computer generated. Criminal Read →
18. 2024-08-13 Mooney v. State (Md. 2024) The Supreme Court of Maryland held that video footage may be authenticated through circumstantial evidence under Maryland Rule 5-901(b)(4), including a portion of the video that no testifying witness personally observed, and that the advent of image-generating artificial intelligence does not at present displace existing methods of authenticating video. Authentication Read →
19. 2024-07-30 Pegasystems Inc. v. Appian Corporation (Va. Ct. App. 2024) Electronic evidence in Virginia is authenticated under the same very modest Rule 2:901 standard as anything else, the possibility that electronic evidence can be tampered with does not raise that standard absent a specific claim of tampering, and it is an abuse of discretion to exclude software while forbidding the proponent from attempting to authenticate it merely because it sits on a different device than the one used in discovery. Civil Read →
20. 2024-07-03 Matter of Gabriel H. (N.Y. App. Div., 4th Dep't 2024) The Appellate Division, Fourth Department held that three hacked security camera videos were sufficiently authenticated by circumstantial evidence of their distinctive characteristics, by a detective's testimony matching the living room and its furnishings, and by an FBI agent's testimony that he saw no signs of tampering, and that a respondent's assertion that the videos could be deepfakes did not reduce their weight where Family Court found no cuts, edits or timestamp jumps. Authentication Read →

Authentication disputes of this kind usually turn on what an examiner can establish about the file itself rather than on what the video appears to show, which is work for an independent forensic examiner.