Michael Cohen claims he was 'trying to be helpful' as he testifies on submitting fake AI cases in court

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK: During the hush money trial testimony in Manhattan, prosecutor Susan Hoffinger scrutinized Michael Cohen's use of artificial intelligence to generate fake legal cases.

The prosecutor referenced Donald Trump's former lawyer's briefing in 2023 when he used Google Bard, an AI chatbot to conduct legal searches, reported CNN.

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger questions Michael Cohen's intentions behind submitting fake AI cases

Hoffinger asked Cohen whether he intended to mislead anyone through his searches on Google Bard, to which he replied "No," as he explained in court about what he did to generate the fake legal cases.

"After I just copy and pasted the first three, because they were on point, I sent them over to my lawyer's office to review and incorporate into the document," said Cohen.

"I was just trying to be helpful," he added.

The Trump "fixer" noted his lack of access to Westlaw or LexisNexis.

He emphasized that he intended to be helpful but his lawyer found the error and promptly notified the court.

Inside Michael Cohen's fake AI legal cases

In a detailed December 2023 court filing, Cohen stated that the incident stemmed from his mistaken belief that Google Bard was a "super-charged search engine" while researching precedents to support his supervised release.

Later, Cohen wrote in a filing that the AI-generated cases did not exist.

In 2018, he was sentenced to a prison term of three years and three years of post-release supervision for crimes including hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels who had an alleged affair with Trump, lying to Congress, and also failing to report income, according to NBC News.

In the court filing in December, Cohen stated that he has "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."

Michael Cohen claimed he trusted his lawyer with the submission of the AI-generated cases

The former lawyer claimed that he was unaware that the AI service could produce fictitious legal cases and argued that he trusted his attorney to “vet my suggested additions before incorporating them.”

The former lawyer said he was represented by attorney David Schwartz in matters related to his supervised release since July 2022.

“He relied on his lawyer, as he had every right to do," said Cohen's current attorney, E Danya Perry who supported his motion for early termination of his supervised release.

"Unfortunately, his lawyer appears to have made an honest mistake in not verifying the citations in the brief he drafted and filed,” Perry defended Cohen's actions.

She noted that the court documents "show that Mr. Cohen did absolutely nothing wrong."