Thompson v. Commissioner of Social Security Administration

How did the court address the AI-related conduct?

Senior Judge James A. Teilborg granted Thompson's Motion to Strike or Amend Opening Brief and ordered that "[t]he identified portions are deemed to be stricken." The court imposed no sanction, issued no show-cause order, and made no referral in this case; the only other treatment of counsel's citations is the reference to the sanction imposed in the separate case. The court denied as moot a motion for an extension of time to file the reply, which had been filed on its due date. On the merits, it rejected Thompson's three challenges to the administrative law judge's decision (the step-two treatment of mental impairments, a residual functional capacity said to lack medical opinion support, and a claimed conflict between the stooping limitation and the jobs identified at step five), affirmed the decision, and directed the Clerk to enter judgment. Striking the portions was the relief Thompson himself requested, and the order does not label it a sanction.

Why does Thompson v. Commissioner of Social Security Administration matter for law firms using AI?

Thompson is a short treatment of defective citations inside a longer Social Security decision. The Commissioner raised concerns about citations in the Opening Brief, which the order sorts into four problems, and Thompson responded by asking the court’s leave to strike or amend the affected portions. Judge Teilborg granted that request and deemed the identified portions stricken. The order does not list the authorities involved; it describes the problems, drawing on Thompson’s own motion, as a non-existent quotation from an existing case, a mischaracterized proposition, a non-existent case, and a miscitation of a case that did not address the asserted issue.

What sets the order apart is its reference to counsel’s record. The court noted that Maren Bam “was recently sanctioned for submitting an Opening Brief in a separate Social Security case,” quoting the sanction order in that case for its description of the brief as one that “was replete with citation-related deficiencies, including those consistent with artificial intelligence generated hallucinations.” A footnote records that the Commissioner flagged the same sanction. That separate case is Mavy v. Commissioner of Social Security Administration; according to that entry, after this order the district judge in Mavy vacated the Rule 11 finding and four of the six sanctions on reconsideration in January 2026. The Thompson order does not itself find that AI produced the citations in this brief, and the tracker’s AI attribution remains an inference.

The court did not sanction counsel here and decided the appeal on the merits, affirming the administrative law judge. Firms documenting compliance may wish to consider that, in this case, a motion to strike flagged material resolved the citation problem without a show-cause order, while the court still placed counsel’s sanction in another case on the record of this one.