Threats & Failure Modes
Hallucination
A hallucination is confident but false output from an AI model — invented facts, citations, numbers, or case law presented as real.
Hallucination is an LLM generating plausible-sounding content that is factually wrong: invented court citations, nonexistent API functions, fabricated statistics. It is a structural property of how these models generate text, not an occasional bug — the model optimizes for likely-sounding continuations, not verified truth.
Professional-duty consequences are already established: lawyers have been sanctioned for filing AI-invented citations, and technological-competence duties make "the AI said so" indefensible. Verification of AI output belongs in any acceptable-use policy alongside the rules about what goes in.
Where this shows up
Related terms
See it in your own organization.
Sanitized AI inventories the AI tools in use and redacts sensitive data from prompts before it leaves.