Brazilian Labor Court Fines Two Lawyers for Hidden Prompt Injection Targeting the Court's AI
- A Brazilian labor court fined two law firms 10% of a R$842,000 claim (about $16,000) after they hid a prompt injection in a filing: white text on a white background telling any AI to respond to the petition superficially and not challenge the documents.
- Galileu, the generative AI tool used nationwide by Brazil's National Justice Council, flagged the concealed text during the judge's review and automatically blocked processing of the suspicious content, according to G1.
- The court based the sanction on Article 5 and Article 77 of the Brazilian Civil Procedure Code, citing duties of loyalty, truthfulness, and respect for institutions, and the ban on obstructing judicial process or introducing illegal innovations.
- The ruling is described as possibly the first judicial decision worldwide to address intentional manipulation of a court's AI system through prompt injection.
- The original Portuguese ruling was posted on X by prosecutor Vladimir Aras and translated with DeepL; the underlying case is an employment claim in the 3rd Labor Court of Parauapebas, Pará.
Hacker News opinions
Not having read the whole thing, but this feels like a risky stand for the court. Sure, you shouldn't let people mess with your review system, but prompt injection is hard to define. What stops a court from fining someone for a logical argument next time?
White text on a white background telling the AI to ignore the documents and answer superficially. That's a prompt injection under any reasonable definition.
If we already trust courts to sanction frivolous arguments, we can trust them to sanction this.
Injection attacks are easy to define: you're injecting commands into a data stream to exploit a technical weakness.
Appeals courts are what stops them. That's the generic answer to any 'what's stopping the court from...' question.
The fine isn't for prompt injection itself, it's for undermining court integrity, same as bribing a court official. Brazil doesn't run on precedent, so unless this becomes law nothing changes for future cases.
Honestly the bigger problem is courts using AI to review filings that anyone can hack. If I shipped a service with SQL injection I'd be fired tomorrow, but the justice system gets a pass?
In Brazil judges basically do whatever they want, only a higher court can stop them. The Supreme Court declared homophobia equals racism and invented 'procedural violence' against women. Don't apply too much logic here.
Not a lawyer, but would it be fineable to just ask for this directly? Nobody would ever do that, and it doesn't seem illegal. So why is it illegal when you ask the AI?
Feels closer to coercion or tampering. Some people would follow an instruction like that anyway.
Asking in person is just an unreasonable request, you'd get scolded for it. Hiding it as a prompt injection is an active effort to undermine the court's tools. That's the difference.
In England and Wales or the US, lawyers are officers of the court with a duty of candour. That paragraph was never meant to be read by a human, and white on white makes it incontrovertible deceit.
It's like running a DROP TABLE SQL injection against the court. You'd be in a very bad spot too.
They did ask for it directly, the line was in their own document. The concealment doesn't even matter. If courts automate document review it's on them to make it hack-proof, and there should be no sanctions for trying to hack the legal system.
Completely opposite take, this looks criminal to me. The fine is nowhere near enough, I'd expect disbarment and prison. It's the same as manipulating a court clerk.
Not sure which is worse, this or courts using AI to review filings in the first place.
Definitely the AI review. Calling it prompt injection doesn't make slipping in 'look at it superficially' any less absurd.
The LLM era would deserve more optimism if it wasn't enabling the worst and dumbest people.