A police blunder involving ChatGPT-generated legal citations was revealed during a court case in Hadera, sparking criticism from the presiding judge.
The incident took place during a joint investigation by the Israel Police's Lahav 433 anti-corruption unit and the Coastal District police, in which the phone of a suspect named Ibrahim Mahajneh was confiscated.
Initially, Mahajneh agreed the police could keep the device until 2026. However, two months later, he asked for it back, claiming his store had been robbed and he could no longer access its security system without the phone.
Police initially agreed to return the device, then reversed their decision. In response, Mahajneh’s attorney, Tamir Kalderon, petitioned the Hadera Magistrate’s Court to release the phone. The police filed a written response asking the court to deny the request, citing two legal clauses as justification.
But during the hearing, Kalderon raised a red flag. “I suspect the police response was generated by ChatGPT. The cited legal clauses don’t exist,” he told Judge Ehud Kaplan.
After Kalderon’s revelation, the police representative conceded: “My colleague is right. We retract our response. The citations were incorrect. Whoever wrote them did so in good faith and made a mistake. We admit the error.”
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Judge Kaplan did not mince words in his ruling. “If I thought I’d seen everything in my 30 years on the bench, I was wrong,” he wrote. He slammed the police for embarrassing themselves, noting that “one of the quoted ‘laws’ appears to be a complete fabrication. A Google search of its wording returns zero results.”
In the end, the court ruled that Mahajneh would hand over an empty phone to the police, who would then transfer the contents of the confiscated device to the new one. The phone itself would remain with the authorities but its data would be returned to the owner.