Mission Critical Project Services, Inc.

What did the court warn about?

Protest denied in part and dismissed in part. GAO found the agency reasonably rejected MCPS' initial quotations as technically unacceptable under the brand-name requirement, and dismissed MCPS' remaining challenges to the evaluation and award because, without a timely revised quotation or an otherwise technically acceptable quotation, MCPS was not an interested party. No sanction was imposed for the erroneous citations, but GAO advised that "any future submission of filings with citations to non-existent authority may, after a review of the totality of the circumstances, result in the imposition of sanctions."

Why does Mission Critical Project Services, Inc. matter for law firms using AI?

Mission Critical is one of several GAO bid-protest decisions that cite Raven Investigations and KE Systems Services on unverified AI output. In footnote 10, GAO recounts that after the agency requested dismissal, MCPS cited cases in its response; when GAO asked for copies, the protester provided cases with different citation information, cases that do not stand for the propositions MCPS asserted, and non-existent decisions. GAO wrote that the citations “bear the hallmarks of the use of a large-language model or other artificial intelligence (AI) without adequate verification that the generated results were accurate.”

GAO restated that it “necessarily reserves an inherent right to dismiss any protest and to impose sanctions against a protester, where a protester’s actions undermine the integrity and effectiveness of our process,” and advised the protester, which appeared through Ryan Franz and Emily Franz rather than counsel, that future filings citing non-existent authority may draw sanctions. Firms documenting compliance may wish to consider that here GAO applied the same verification expectation to a protester appearing without counsel.