AI Is Breaking the Institutions Meant to Catch It

A defamation case dismissed for AI-fabricated citations ^[12] is not a story about a careless barrister. It is a story about which institutions the public has trusted to be the last line of verification — and what it means when those institutions fail from the inside rather than being overwhelmed from the outside. The legal system's authority rests on the premise that submissions are checked. That premise was not circumvented; it was eroded by a professional who treated AI output as a research tool without applying the verification step the…