Computer scientist Dr Craig Wright has been ordered to pay £225,000 in legal costs following a ruling that he had improperly used artificial intelligence (AI) in a failed attempt to appeal a High Court decision which found he is not the founder of Bitcoin. The ruling was made by Lord Justice Arnold in a court session on Thursday.
Dr Wright had previously lost a legal battle against the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), a non-profit group composed of various cryptocurrency firms, regarding his claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure historically credited with creating Bitcoin. In a judgment delivered in March last year, the court found that Dr Wright had "lied extensively" to support his claim. His attempt to challenge this ruling at the Court of Appeal in November 2022 was unsuccessful.
Following these events, Copa and several other Bitcoin developers sought an order from the Court of Appeal requiring Dr Wright to pay their legal costs in opposing his appeal. Consequently, Lord Justice Arnold ordered that Dr Wright pay £100,000 to Copa and £125,000 to the other developers, deeming these payments "appropriate" due to the "wholly without merit" nature of Dr Wright's appeal attempts.
The judge also remarked that Dr Wright had "improperly used AI to prepare his submissions, which risked significantly misleading the court." He characterised the scale and complexity of Dr Wright’s submissions as "exceptional, wholly unnecessary, and wholly disproportionate," further suggesting that there were indications Dr Wright engaged in this litigation for ulterior motives, particularly in relation to his publicity campaign.
Copa had previously initiated legal actions against Dr Wright concerning his assertions about being Satoshi, which were described during a trial last year as a "brazen lie" substantiated by "forgery on an industrial scale." The original Bitcoin founding document, a white paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System," was published in 2008 under Satoshi's name.
Dr Wright's legal representatives previously argued that substantial evidence existed to affirm his role in the creation of Bitcoin. However, Mr Justice Mellor, presiding over the case, determined that the evidence clearly indicated Dr Wright's claims were false. Furthermore, he issued a court order restricting Dr Wright from initiating or threatening further legal action regarding Bitcoin related issues.
In December of the same year, Justice Mellor sentenced Dr Wright to a suspended prison term of 12 months for contempt of court when he found that Dr Wright had breached the court order by filing a new legal claim with an error in valuation exceeding £900 billion.
This recent ruling from the court may mark one of the initial instances in the English civil courts where legal costs have been imposed as a result of improper AI usage. Legal expert Phil Sherrell, a partner at Bird & Bird, noted that the cost order against Dr Wright was partly premised on his illegitimate use of generative AI tools during the preparation of his appeal documents. Sherrell stated, "This is a stark warning to litigants, and in particular litigants in person, about the risks of using generative AI tools to create court documents."
Source: Noah Wire Services