If we applied the same diagnostic framework to vendor claims that we apply to LLM output, the exhibition floor would fail its own evaluation.
China's patent authority issues a formal warning against AI agent tools for patent drafting, naming OpenClaw specifically. The concerns — hallucination defects, information leakage, bad faith applications — are the same ones American lawyers raise about AI in practice. The difference is that a government is now naming specific tools as threats to practice integrity. The U.S. has not done this.
A family law practice guide built on Heppner. The headline says ChatGPT but the ruling involved Claude — the brand name has become generic shorthand, which is itself a small act of misrecognition. The substantive warning is sound: every AI chat about a legal issue that happens outside the attorney-client relationship is a potential exhibit. The authors predict AI-related discovery requests are coming. They are already here — Mobley v. Workday class notice went out in February.
The EEOC removed all AI employment guidance from its website in January 2025. Four states have since written their own laws, each with a different liability standard — from California's disparate impact framework to Texas's intent-only requirement. When the federal government withdraws standards, the gap fills with divergent state regimes and vendor self-assessment. That vacuum is exactly where confident misstatement thrives.
ProPublica's analysis of two decades of FOIA data: 23,000 criminal cases dropped in six months, including 5,000 drug cases, 1,300 terrorism cases, and 900 fraud investigations — all to resource 32,000 new immigration prosecutions. A 28-year DOJ veteran says the building blocks of successful fentanyl prosecutions were pulled out. A retired AUSA who describes himself as a Trump supporter worries about emboldened union corruption. This is the resource environment in which legal technology vendors are selling tools to public defenders. The offices that need AI most are the ones the system is defunding by other means.
An industry executive with 40 years in legal tech and no law license argues lawyers should become Iron Man by embracing Claude Code. The piece opens with two anonymous anecdotes — unnamed founder, unnamed company, unverifiable results — then attributes a "10X productivity" claim to Zack Shapiro that Shapiro did not make. The vocabulary is revealing: "transformational superpower," "superhero powers," "wear the suit." This is not analysis. It is the vendor hallucination phenomenon in published form — confident, fluent, structurally ungrounded. Read it as a specimen, not a source.
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