Brazilian Court Sanctions Lawyers for Prompt Injection in Court Filing
jetstream.security
jetstream.security
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m curious if it would also be a fineable offense to ask for this directly. Obviously nobody would ever do that… it would come off as someone thinking they had Jedi powers or something. But it doesn’t seem to me (again, not a lawyer) that this would be illegal.
So why is it when you ask it of AI?
That paragraph was never intended to be read by the judge or opposing counsel, it’s a deliberate attempt at messing with the tools they use to analyse the filing. The fact that it’s white text on a white background makes it an incontrovertible attempt at deceit.
We can discuss how wise it is to use AI to analyse legal documents for you, but that doesn’t change how outright deceit should be handled by the court.
Asking an LLM to do this through a prompt injection attack is less an unreasonable request and more an active effort to undermine the court's infrastructure and processes.
I'm not a lawyer; that's my intuition on the matter.
There are probably certain humans who would follow commands as given, perhaps a child or child-like?
Running the court system?
It's not illegal to ask someone to send you money. So why is it illegal when I ask their AI to send me money from their bank account?! Nothing in this world makes sense!
That adds an interesting meta-twist to this.
Where to begin...
The Brazilian supreme court essentially runs the country monocratically alongside the executive, bypassing the senate and congress.
We had to elect enough opposition senators to form an absolute majority in the senate with the explicit goal of impeaching the supreme court judges for infinitely worse violations than this.
Even after this herculean effort, nothing is guaranteed. The judges are nearly omnipotent and might just find a crime to hang our senators with before 2027. The crime of the day is foreign influence: they accuse our senators of having been financed by Americans.
Integrity has left this country a long time ago.
Oh no, they pointed out things that are happening: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/trump-state-...
And ... I didn't read this as an attempt to catch the court shirking it's duties. They weren't going to report the court, they were just going to take advantage of having achieved a low profile for the case.
"Back to the Future" was set in 2015, where Marty says "Arrested, judged and convicted in 2 hours???" and Doc answers "Justice is swift since we've removed lawyers". We don't be flying cars but we have this comedic performative justice without a single fair outcome (talking from France). Criminals are freed, prison is a big networking symposium for some jobs, good people whose accusers admitted to lying are thrown for 6 years, because they refused to give their lawyer a €1000 bribe for the judge... Things happen. And France is still seen as a civilized country.
I am a lawyer myself. I recently had an order that practically looks and smells ai generated.
I sent the output to Turnitin and it returned almost every line turned out ai generated.
Heck, 4 paragraphs were the same text reworked as a filler.
I filed a second appeal and the case has not been picked up.
My question is, if the judge is using an ai to decide a case, and the judge has outsourced their "judgement" to ai, I, as a lawyer should be able to influence that.
One could argue " well that's the judge's discretion, who decides" but I don't.
When I appear for a client before a judge, I "expect" that judge to apply their own mind, and only their own mind without any bias. Judge offloading their rights imo renders them biased and I should be able to influence the other person (or the ai)
Not that I have done it before. Just saying
You seem to be completely oblivious to the actual content of the AI output for some reason?
If the judge sent you an AI-generated court order for your execution just because you didn't pay for parking, you think they'd get away with it?
Not having read the article, but I feel this is a risky stand for the court to take. It makes sense that you should stop others from impeding your review system - however you implement it, yet "prompt injection" is hard to define. What is stopping the court from fining people for a "logical argument" in future filings?
They frequently legislate too despite not being elected representatives. For example, there is a racism law but not a homophobia law, but the supreme court simply declared that homophobia equals racism, and now you can be jailed for like 10 years without bail for homophobic statements.
It's getting to the point that judges are creating parallel sets of laws. They have "guidelines" for themselves which they follow in cases involving gender violence for example. It goes far beyond lowering the standards of proof when women are the accusers. Recently, they independently came up with the concept of "procedural violence" against women. Imagine a scenario where a woman falsely accuses a man of domestic violence and the man proves his own innocence. Now the man can't sue her for the wrongful accusation because suing her is now "procedural violence" against women.
Don't try to apply too much logic here. The judges can do whatever they want for any reason they want. It's not risky at all for the courts.
But Brasil court doesn't work under precedents. So unless this becomes law, it doesn't change anything for future cases.
German courts official doesn't work under precedent either. But in practice it often behaves like it does. Eg very prominently discussed in the media for judgements around renting of residential property.
In the other direction, in a common law system it's up to the judge to decide what precedent, if any, applies. You can always find some peculiarity of the case that justifies deviation, or you can ignore some peculiarity to justify following a precedent you do like.
The higher court that handles appeals.
That’s the generic answer to “what is stopping the court from…” in a functional judicial system.
Seems pretty easy to me. Any injection attack is an attempt to exploit technical weakness by injecting commands into data streams.
Is the problem not they're using AI for review and court decisions that can easily get hacked? If I open ports that can get hacked or allow sql injections I'll lose my job straight away tomorrow, but apparently the justice system is immune from that?
Before most of the job was writing code, now its reading it, this is the IT industry in a nutshell, you need to adapt and deal with changes how is it any different from all the new frameworks and paradigm shifts at all? I don't understand why people cant deal with that, it's how it always was, things were always changing this is just another iteration of that.
For any reasonable definition of "prompt injection", that pretty clearly is one.