Hallucination — Legalnaut glossary  A Markdown version of this page is available at https://legalnaut.com/glossary/hallucination.md for AI and LLM tools. 

  Hallucination
=============

 A hallucination is a confident, fluent statement from a language model that is not supported by any source.

Courts have sanctioned lawyers for filing submissions containing invented citations: the AI Hallucination Cases database kept by Damien Charlotin at damiencharlotin.com listed more than 2,000 such decisions worldwide as of September 2026. The risk is not theoretical and it is not rare.

The defence is structural rather than aspirational. If every answer carries the document it came from, an unsupported claim has nowhere to hide, and the reviewer can see immediately that a citation is missing.

 Related: [Retrieval-augmented generation](https://legalnaut.com/glossary/rag), [Provenance](https://legalnaut.com/glossary/provenance)

 Legalnaut builds this out of your own case file. [See the plans](https://legalnaut.com/pricing).

 SCREENSHOT

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