Burr & Forman's David Timm was featured in Washington Technology discussing how the rise of artificial intelligence tools is creating new challenges in government contract protests. The article explores recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) decisions revealing fabricated or non-existent citations in filings generated by AI, highlighting the potential risks of overreliance on generative technology in legal work.

David explained that the GAO has the authority to dismiss any protest that undermines the integrity of the process. “The reason for that is it undermines the integrity and effectiveness of the process, and causes a huge waste of time and resources,” he said. “On the fake citations and determining that they're wrong, it causes GAO to have to spend time and judicial resources to separate the issues that have merit from those that are just invented from whole cloth.”

He also expressed concern that the problem could be more widespread than current decisions suggest. “I think this is going to happen more and more often, where people ask the LLM to generate a definition rather than rely on Black's Law Dictionary,” David said. He cautioned that if GAO or a court were to rely on hallucinated case law, “it could create a cascading effect where future precedent is tainted by a citation that was wrong in the first place.”

The Washington Technology article underscores the growing tension between innovation and accountability in the legal aspects of government contracting. David’s perspective offers an important reminder that while AI can be a useful tool for research and drafting, it must be used with careful verification and professional oversight to maintain the integrity of the process.

To read the full article, click here.