The judge spotted ChatGPT. Why didn’t the lawyers?

Imagine receiving a witness letter in support of your client’s case. It appears to confirm facts on which you intend to rely. The English reads reasonably well. The document is added to the evidence bundle and filed with the court. There is just one problem. The last sentence offers to turn the letter into a formal affidavit, add notarisation language or make the wording more neutral. That is not what you would normally expect to find at the end of a witness’s account of events. It reads remarkably like an invitation from a chatbot to continue the conversation. Would you have noticed it?

In AA v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] UKFTT PA747122024 (IAC), the judge did. The solicitors who filed the letter apparently had not.

The case raises questions about the use of AI translation in legal proceedings. But for me, its most interesting aspect is not a demonstrated failure of machine translation. It is the responsibility of lawyers for checking the provenance, preparation and reliability of the documents they place before a court. And there is an interesting tension in the judgment between the judge’s criticism of the solicitors and the way the Tribunal dealt with the use of AI translation itself.

A witness letter with an unexpected ending

The case concerned an Egyptian national appealing against the refusal of his asylum claim. He maintained that he faced persecution because of his political activities and claimed association with the Muslim Brotherhood. Among the evidence was a letter from a witness identified as YR, who said he had known the appellant in Egypt and had participated in political activities with him. At the hearing, First-tier Tribunal Judge CJ Williams asked how the witness’s letter had been prepared. The witness initially explained that he had written it with someone’s assistance and that his daughter had translated it into English. But the judge had noticed something peculiar at the end of the letter: a sentence offering to adapt the document into a formal affidavit, insert notarisation language or use more neutral wording. That prompted the judge to ask whether ChatGPT or another AI system had been used. YR explained that he had written the letter in Arabic, used ChatGPT to translate it into English and then asked his daughter to compare the English version with the Arabic original to check that the meaning was the same.

There is a small but interesting distinction between those accounts. In the initial explanation, the daughter had translated the letter. In the subsequent explanation, ChatGPT had translated it and the daughter had checked it. One account might simply be shorthand for the other. The judgment does not suggest that the distinction was itself decisive. Nevertheless, for lawyers assessing the provenance of evidence, the difference between translating a document and checking someone else’s translation is not insignificant.

The judge’s criticism

Paragraph 28 contains the observation that, in my view, lawyers should concentrate on: “It is unfortunate that it fell to the Tribunal to notice this”. The judge was referring to the discovery of the apparent AI-generated text in the letter, something the appellant’s solicitors had apparently failed to identify before submitting it. The judge also criticised the absence of a statement of truth from a witness who was intended to give oral evidence. These are separate issues. One concerns the preparation and checking of a document. The other concerns the form in which witness evidence was presented. Neither requires a finding that the underlying Arabic was mistranslated. That is precisely why the episode is worth examining. Lawyers routinely receive documents prepared by clients, witnesses, foreign counsel, administrative staff and other third parties. They cannot

personally create or verify every piece of information those documents contain. But when does reasonable reliance on material prepared by others become an inadequate check on evidence submitted in their professional capacity? And how far should lawyers be expected to investigate the use of AI in producing that material?

Two very different kinds of checking

For me, AA exposes a distinction that is frequently overlooked when lawyers discuss AI translation. The first kind of checking concerns the document itself. Does it contain extraneous material? Is it complete? Does it appear to be the witness’s evidence rather than a draft, template or chatbot response? Has the final version been read before filing? Does it satisfy the relevant procedural requirements? In this case, the telltale sentence was in English. Detecting it required no knowledge of Arabic and no particular expertise in translation. That is what makes the judge’s criticism difficult to dismiss. The second kind of checking is much harder. Does the English version accurately and completely communicate what the witness wrote in Arabic? Has anything been omitted, added, softened or made more emphatic? Have factual assertions retained their meaning? Has the translation introduced language that changes the character or certainty of the evidence? Answering those questions requires more than reading the English fluently. It requires an assessment against the original by someone competent to perform that task. A lawyer who does not read Arabic may be able to identify a chatbot’s leftover instruction. The same lawyer may be entirely unable to identify a subtle mistranslation that materially changes the witness’s account.

The fact that one check has been performed tells us very little about whether the other has. The problem with ‘human involvement’

There is another aspect of this case I find revealing. The witness said his daughter had compared the Arabic and English versions to ensure that the meaning was the same. That may have been a useful check. There is no finding that she was unable to perform it or that the translation was inaccurate. But should the mere fact that a human has reviewed an AI-generated translation be sufficient to reassure a lawyer relying on it? I would suggest not, without knowing more about the nature of the review. Who carried it out? What linguistic competence did that person possess? Did they compare the complete texts? Were they checking for accuracy, omissions and alterations of meaning, or simply whether the English appeared to reflect the general sense of the Arabic?

Those are quite different exercises.

In a legal setting, the distinction matters because the translation is not merely facilitating informal communication. It is being used as evidence. The judgment does not determine whether the daughter’s review was adequate. Nor does it establish what further verification, if any, the solicitors undertook. It does, however, provide a useful example of why the presence of a human somewhere in an AI-assisted process should not automatically be equated with meaningful quality assurance.

Judicial tolerance is not judicial approval

There is an important qualification to all this.

Paragraph 29 records that the Home Office presenting officer did not argue that the use of AI for translation, with some human involvement, warranted reducing the weight given to YR’s evidence on that particular ground. The judge ultimately found that the evidence of the two supporting witnesses did not particularly strengthen the appellant’s claim. The appeal was dismissed following an assessment of credibility and the evidence as a whole. But the Tribunal did not find that ChatGPT

had produced an inaccurate translation. Nor did it establish a general rule that ChatGPT translations checked by a family member are acceptable evidence. That distinction is important. It would be easy to present AA as another case where AI translation went wrong and a litigant suffered the consequences. The judgment does not support that conclusion. Equally, it would be misleading to interpret the absence of a translation-related penalty as judicial endorsement of AI-assisted translation. What the decision demonstrates is narrower, but arguably more interesting: a court can be critical of the way AI-assisted evidence was prepared and submitted without treating AI involvement as an automatic reason for discounting that evidence.

A different warning from the cases already emerging

In my earlier discussion of Lozano Gonzάlez v Roberge, a Canadian tribunal confronted a ChatGPT translation of legislation that had effectively rewritten the statutory provisions on which a litigant relied. In Euroboor BV v Grafova, an American court struggled to understand the reasoning in a Dutch judgment supplied in a Google Translate version. Those cases raised questions about what happens when translated legal material fails to communicate the meaning on which a legal argument depends.

AA raises a related but different problem. Here, the visible failing was not a demonstrated mistranslation. It was the failure to identify an obvious indication of chatbot involvement before the document reached the Tribunal. That brings the issue much closer to the everyday work of lawyers managing evidence. It is one thing to ask whether AI can translate accurately enough for use in proceedings. It is another to ask what a legal team must do before relying on a document that someone else has translated using AI. The first question concerns technological performance and linguistic reliability. The second concerns professional judgment, document control and accountability. The answers are connected, but they are not the same.

Who takes responsibility?

Nothing in AA establishes professional misconduct by the solicitors, or a particular sanction for submitting an AI-translated document. Nor should a decision of a UK First-tier Tribunal be treated as laying down a universal standard for lawyers in other jurisdictions. But the wider questions transcend the procedural rules of any single court. Suppose a witness sends a lawyer an English statement translated from another language using ChatGPT. The lawyer cannot read the original language. The witness assures the lawyer that a relative has checked the translation. The English looks plausible. The document is then filed. What exactly is the lawyer relying on? The witness’s assurance? The relative’s linguistic ability? The apparent fluency of the English? The reputation of the AI system? And what evidence is there of the verification process if the translation is subsequently challenged?

I do not think the answer is that every lawyer must personally translate every foreign-language document or that AI can never form part of a translation workflow. The question is whether the lawyer has sufficient grounds for treating the version filed as a reliable representation of the underlying evidence. That is a question about the process as well as the product.

A warning worth taking seriously

The AI-generated sentence in AA was conspicuous enough for the judge to notice. Its presence was embarrassing, but it also served a useful purpose: it made the use of ChatGPT visible and prompted questions about the document’s preparation. Many machine-translated documents contain no such obvious clue. They look like perfectly ordinary English documents. Some may be entirely accurate. Others may not be. The difficulty is that the absence of a conspicuous error tells us nothing reliable

about the accuracy of the underlying translation. For lawyers, that is the uncomfortable point. The judge’s observation in AA should not be read as a finding that AI translation is inherently unreliable It should be read as a reminder that someone must take responsibility for what reaches the court.

If the legal team misses an obvious trace of ChatGPT that can be detected simply by reading the English, what basis does it have for confidence in the parts of the document that can only be checked against the original language?

That is a question worth asking before the next witness letter is filed.

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