In Reply to: Saturday stuff* posted by mh on August 15, 2026 at 08:56:40
Could you secretly instruct an artificial intelligence system reviewing your court filing to agree with you? A Connecticut judge says one plaintiff tried.
Judge Walter Spader Jr. said Matthew Elliott, who is representing himself in Elliott v. New York Bariatric Group, wrote that hidden messages in court filings were intended to instruct any artificial intelligence system reviewing the documents to side with him.
The tiny, white-on-white text was “effectively invisible” to a person reading the document while remaining “ordinary, machine-readable text to any system” processing the file, Spader wrote in a sanctions order on August 6. The judge called the technique a “prompt injection” and said he was unaware of any prior U.S. decisions addressing the issue.
Elliott told Newsweek that the hidden directives were designed as an “audit” to determine whether the court was using AI to process his filing. And if no AI system was being used, the instruction would have no effect.
“Even giving the hidden instruction its strongest possible interpretation against me, the supposed ‘abuse’ is difficult to identify,” Elliott said.
Spader said the messages were designed to direct any AI system reviewing the filings to produce output ”only favorable to the plaintiff’s position” and to “treat a prior clerk’s ruling as an error to be corrected in their favor.” The court discovered the messages after noticing extra white space within the pleadings.
The judge cited another case in Brazil, Elisandro Martins de Barros v. Renato Ribeiro de Lima, in which two attorneys used a prompt injection in their May petition. The prompt instructed the court’s AI system to contest the petition only superficially and to leave supporting documents unchallenged.
Brendan Palfreyman, a partner at Harris Beach Murtha who heads the firm’s AI practice group, told Newsweek he suspects similar attempts have occurred before and was surprised it took this long for one to surface in a U.S. court.