{
  "id": 13005975,
  "title": "Cited but Not Consulted: A Counterfactual Audit of Legal Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/08/cited-but-not-consulted-a-counterfactual-audit-of-legal-chain-of",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-10-08T17:26:17.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "arXiv cs.AI",
    "slug": "arxiv-cs-ai",
    "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12361v1"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": null,
  "summary": "Large language models increasingly justify legal decisions by naming the statute or precedent behind a verdict, treated as evidence that the decision follows from it. We test this directly: holding case facts fixed, we substitute the named legal authority for an unrelated one and decode a model's evolving verdict from its hidden states. Across seven open-weight models (8B-70B) and four benchmarks…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}