AI hallucinations: how to verify fake Turkish court citations

Short answer: An AI hallucination is when an AI writes a decision that does not exist, or a wrong citation, as if it were real. Before you put any citation from an AI into a petition, open the full text of the decision and verify it. You can start checking citations and quotes in three steps: see whether the AI actually ran a search, search the citation again together with the court or chamber, and compare the sentence you will quote with the text of the decision. Separately assess whether the decision fits your facts and is still current.

Why does AI hallucinate and write citations that do not exist?#

A language model can produce text from patterns it learned in training, without consulting any source. In doing so it may attach the wrong chamber, docket (esas) number or decision (karar) number to a decision whose content is roughly right; this is called a hallucination. In Turkish practice a citation (künye) identifies a decision by court, chamber, docket number, decision number and date. A hallucinated citation looks flawless in form; you only see that it is wrong when you check the source. Choosing a more capable model reduces the risk but does not remove it.

It helps to think of the problem as two separate layers:

The consequences can be serious#

In June 2026, in a case before a civil court of first instance (asliye hukuk mahkemesi) in Kızılcahamam, Ankara, the court could not find the Yargıtay (Court of Cassation) decisions cited in the petition of a lawyer with 25 years of experience. According to the news report, the court found that the decisions “could not be found as cited when checked on UYAP” (UYAP is the Turkish e-justice system); letters were sent to the Ankara Bar Association and the public prosecutor’s office. In the report, the lawyer says the content of the decisions was correct and the AI tool gave the wrong chamber and decision numbers (Hukuki Haber, in Turkish).

This case shows where the risk lies: even if the content is correct, a wrong citation puts both the argument in the petition and you in a difficult position.

The AI Use Recommendation Guide for Lawyers (Avukatlar İçin Yapay Zekâ Kullanımı Tavsiye Rehberi), published in 2026 by the Union of Turkish Bar Associations (Türkiye Barolar Birliği), stresses the same point: before AI output is submitted to a client, a court or an administrative authority, the lawyer should check it for legal accuracy, current legislation and case law, the facts and the state of the evidence (Hukuki Haber’s summary of the guide, in Turkish).

Three-step verification#

1. Check whether a search was run. When your AI app uses a tool, it usually shows this inside the answer as a card or a line; how it looks depends on the app. If no tool use is visible, the model may be writing from memory. Write: “Do not write from memory; search with the decision tools and rely only on the decisions you retrieve.”

2. Search the citation again. Give the court or chamber together with the docket and decision numbers: “Retrieve the full text of Yargıtay 9th Civil Chamber decision E. 2011/48573 K. 2013/31945.” Compare the citation of the record found with the full text. If nothing comes up, search again with the docket number alone; also check on Yargıtay’s decision search page or on UYAP.

3. Compare the quote with the text. For any sentence you will quote in the petition, ask: “Show me the paragraph containing this statement exactly as it appears in the decision.” If no paragraph comes back, or the sentence is not in the paragraph, do not use that quote.

Decisions are in Turkish. Your AI assistant can translate a paragraph for you, but quote and verify the Turkish original.

A real search: one genuine and one fabricated citation#

On 27 October 2026 we searched with Yargı PRO’s tools for two citations.

For the made-up citation, the tool returned no decision and added a warning: a lack of results does not mean the decision does not exist; the citation may be recorded differently in the source, or the chamber filter may be too narrow. This warning matters. Zero results is an alarm, not a final verdict. If you also find nothing in the official source, treat the citation as unverified and do not use it in your petition until you have the full text.

Checklist before you file the petition#

• For each decision, do the chamber, docket number, decision number and date match the text of the decision?
• Does the quoted sentence appear word for word in the decision?
• Does the decision actually answer the legal question in your case?
• Has the case law changed since, or is there a later general assembly decision?
• Have you saved the link or the full text of the decision in your file?

Does the choice of model matter?#

Yes. Current, more capable models generally use tools more consistently; they can still produce wrong citations or interpretations. If your app lets you choose a model, prefer the higher-tier one, but check the results in every case. Some models tend to summarise instead of quoting directly; state clearly that you want citations and verbatim quotes: “Next to each finding, write the citation of the decision and quote the relevant paragraph verbatim.”

To connect your AI to a database of court decisions: How to connect Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini to Turkish law sources