Think AI can write your company's bid protest? Think again.

Artificial intelligence is upending how we live in the world, and how businesses operate in the world, in ways we will not understand for some time.

But the world of government contracting law is already providing one clear lesson for attorneys and other legal pros to wrap their heads around: overreliance on AI tools, and especially generative AI, to compile protest filings often ends up in a lost case.

Since May of this year, the Government Accountability Office has published nine protest decisions that included non-existent or fabricated information. GAO dismissed eight of them for other reasons, but noted in each that there were non-existent citations or decisions included in the filings.

Then in September, GAO used its sanctions authority to dismiss a protest by Las Vegas-headquartered OReady after finding the company’s filing included non-existent citations or decisions.

That was the third instance since May where GAO found fault in a protest filing from OReady, but this time GAO essentially said it had had enough. GAO could have used its sanction power in the other eight cases involving fabricated citations, but declined to do so.

But if GAO is not a court with the authority to enforce decisions, how exactly does the sanctioning power work?

David Timm, an associate at the law firm Burr & Forman, said GAO has the right to dismiss any protest and sanction a protester without referencing the merits of the challenge.

“The reason for that is it undermines the integrity and effectiveness of the process, and  causes a huge waste of time and resources,” Timm 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.”

Decision number three against Oready was a clear signal from GAO of its frustration in the uptick in these kinds of cases involving fabricated citations, said Annie Birney of the law firm Koprince McCall Pottroff.

But it is “difficult to say the level of precedent GAO could be setting with the Oready dismissal,” added Birney. “Mainly because, as GAO notes in its decision, the aggravating factor in Oready was the fact that the protester had submitted AI hallucinations multiple times.”

As Birney pointed out, the AI hallucinations in legal filings can swing multiple ways.

The most frequent occurrence Birney sees involves AI tools producing legal authority that does not exist, even though the citation may actually cite a real case. But the legal rules cited for the case may not be real, which undermines the filing.

Sam Le, a GovCon attorney and former deputy associate general counsel for procurement law at the Small Business Administration, pointed out all the various legal forums that exist in the world of procurement and contracting.

GAO is one of them, as are the Court of Federal Claims and SBA’s Office of Hearings and Appeals. COFC handles all monetary claims against the U.S. government, including bid protests, while the SBA office handles size determinations and other key program decisions related to small business contracting.

In essence, those legal forums function very differently than others the general public and overall legal community are more familiar with,

“That's at this point too much for a general AI model and the stakes are high too. We're talking about multi-million dollar contracts, that’s too high of a risk to be experimenting with unproven technology,” Le said. “I think the lesson out of that is, it may be worthwhile in brainstorming and coming up with potentially multiple legal theories, but every citation needs to be verified, and preferably by an attorney or someone that's highly specialized in this area of law.”

Timm is concerned that the use of fabricated citations is much more widespread than the nine published decisions that have referenced a protester’s attempt to use them in filings.

“I think this is going to happen more and more often, where people ask the LLM (large language model) to generate a definition rather than rely on Black's Law Dictionary,” Timm said in reference to the legal profession’s most-frequently used dictionary.

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“GAO has a serious incentive to get things right, just like a regular court, because if they issued a public decision that relied upon an assertion that was grounded in fake hallucinated case law, it could create a cascading effect where future precedent is tainted by a citation that was wrong in the first place.”

Birney’s recommended approach for using AI, if one decides to go down that path, is to utilize it in a manner that avoids producing something out of thin air. Finding an applicable GAO decision and having AI summarize or compare facts is one option, as is summarizing or finding key terms in a document that is relevant to the argument.

“This allows you to save additional time without having to review every single document or GAO decision to find what you’re looking for Even then, the actual case must be reviewed by a litigant before citing it,” Birney said.

Below is the list of GAO decisions that informed this article.

• Oready, B-423649 (Sept. 25, 2025)
• IBS Government Services, B-423583 (Aug. 29, 2025)
• Helgen Industries, also known as DeSantis Gunhide B-423635, (Aug. 26, 2025)
• Oready, B-423524.2 (Aug. 13, 2025)
• BioneX, B-423630 (July 25, 2025)
• Wright Brothers Aero, B-423326.2 (July 7, 2025)
• Assessment and Training Solutions Consulting Corporation, B-423398 (June 27, 2025)
• Oready, B-423524 (June 5, 2025) (unpublished, but referenced in the Sept. 25 decision)
• Raven Investigations & Security Consulting, B-423447 (May 7, 2025)