Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suffered a courtroom embarrassment on Tuesday after a federal judge accused his department of littering a legal filing with AI-generated falsehoods.
According to The Washington Post, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper criticized the Department of Health and Human Services for citing nonexistent scientific evidence — potentially AI-generated — "to support sweeping changes to federal teen pregnancy prevention programs."
The Trump administration had argued that congressionally appropriated funds for such programs should avoid encouraging teen sexual activity and be steered only toward abstinence and "body literacy" programming, after HHS cut tens of millions in grants.
In an opinion granting a preliminary injunction as the underlying lawsuit continues, Cooper called the changes "likely arbitrary and capricious" and found the government had failed to provide adequate evidence for its policy.
"He wrote that grant solicitations for the program '(remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations,"" the Post is reporting, adding that, of the seven cited articles, two appeared to be "entirely made up and three others did not exist in the journals they were attributed to."
This is not the first time Kennedy has faced humiliation over AI-generated falsehoods.
Last year, The Washington Post revealed that citations in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" had also been AI-generated, producing garbled references and invented studies.
The Post notes the ruling "stems from a July lawsuit" brought by two Minnesota counties, Washington state, a sex education advocacy nonprofit, and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, which serves Iowa, Nebraska and nearby states.