NetChoice Pulls Expert After Allegations of AI Fabrications (1)

The tech trade group NetChoice said it’s withdrawing an expert witness from its challenge to a Louisiana age verification law after the state’s attorney general alleged his testimony had fake quotes and citations created by artificial intelligence.

Attorneys for Louisiana in a Friday filing took aim at Dr. Anthony Bean, NetChoice’s sole expert in litigation over the state’s law requiring social media platforms verify users’ ages. The state lawyers said that a “cursory comparison” between the filed report and the original sources “would have alerted NetChoice that something is amiss.”

“It is difficult to escape the irony of a NetChoice expert submitting an expert report based on non-existent authorities and quotations. Yet here lies NetChoice—a loud proponent of ‘free expression’ and ‘AI’s Transformative Power'—attempting to rely on such a report and such an expert in this litigation,” the state lawyers wrote.

A spokesperson for NetChoice on Sunday said Bean accidentally submitted the wrong version of his declaration to their attorneys after they reviewed his initial report and asked him to make a minor tweak to it. The trade group said all of the underlying sources they had shared with Louisiana’s lawyers were authentic.

“We’re disappointed in this situation but remain confident in our case challenging the constitutionality of Louisiana SB 162. This was the first time we used Dr. Bean as an expert in one of our cases,” the trade group said in a statement. “We wish we would have had the opportunity to resolve this issue directly with the AG’s office, and had we known of Dr. Bean’s misattributions, we would have withdrawn his declaration because it did not meet our standards.”

The lawsuit is one of several filed by NetChoice, a tech trade group whose members include Google, Meta, and X, against state age verification laws for social media platforms.

Bean didn’t return requests for comment.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill (R) said in a Friday statement that technology companies “must get on board with age verification laws instead of fighting them using fraudulent ‘experts.’”

“That they’re trying to prosecute their case through an ‘expert’ whose opinions are AI hallucinations is mind-boggling,” Murrill said. “I will always stand for our children and against those (real or artificial) who would place them in harm’s way.”

The state attorneys said the reference list in Dr. Bean’s report has incorrect website links and includes the wrong numbers of volumes and pages in publications. “And his report itself is strangely formatted, not least because, well, it looks and reads like a print-out from artificial intelligence (AI),” they wrote.

An expert for the state, Jean Twenge, began reviewing Bean’s report but couldn’t find the quotes included in it, according to the filing.

The Louisiana lawyers said that some of the source articles that NetChoice provided appear to potentially line up with quotes Bean included in his report. “That might suggest an honest mistake—if the quotes were real. They are not,” the state wrote.

The Louisiana lawyers urged the court to exclude the expert testimony, writing, “Dr. Bean’s reliability is shot, and the proof is overwhelming.”

The attorneys are also asking the court to block NetChoice from amending the testimony or getting an extension to file new expert testimony, in addition to “reasonable fees and costs.”

“NetChoice should bear the steep consequences for derailing this litigation and forcing the State Defendants into the costly, painstaking task of dissecting each fabrication in NetChoice’s expert report (all while the State Defendants’ own expert reports are due next week),” the Louisiana lawyers wrote.

NetChoice is represented by attorneys with Lehotsky Keller Cohn and Kean Miller.

Lawyers in courts across the US have faced sanctions for citing AI-hallucinated cases. At least two federal judges have also recently faced scrutiny over rulings that have included made-up quotes.

The case is NetChoice v. Murrill et al, M.D. La., No. 3:25-cv-00231, 8/15/25