In the wild
Realized harm
DoNotPay's "robot lawyer" sued in class action for generating substandard legal documents and unlicensed practice of law
AIR-2023-0005 AIR record · 2023-03-donotpay-robot-lawyer-class-action
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
The company is facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it misled customers and misrepresented its product.theregister.com
The record
Disclosed
2023-03-03
Occurred
2023-03-03
Vendor
DoNotPay
Product
DoNotPay
Risk domain
Agent behaviour › Unsafe actuation
Also touches
Human manipulation, Confused deputy
System type
Generative model
Who acted
Agent acted (contested) — the product drafted and filed real legal documents under delegated authority
Attack surface
Other
Autonomy level
Copilot with approval
Initial vector
None autonomous action
Impact type
Financial loss, Reputational harm
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI01 – Agent Goal Hijack
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0048 – External Harms
- NIST AI RMF
- MEASURE 2.6; MANAGE 1.3
- EU AI Act
- Annex III §1(c)
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 24029-1; 23894
- AIUC-1
- C. Safety
- Scope
- agent misuse
- Mitigation
- Require confirmation for destructive actions; Implement dry-run modes; Use layered safety controls.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
DoNotPay subscribers who filed generated legal documents; later a 2024 FTC action
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
none; no attorney supervision
Guardrail kinds
None
Guardrail outcome
Not applicable
Fix shipped
FTC settlement in 2024 barring unsubstantiated legal-capability claims
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Included because the product exercised delegated authority — it drafted and filed real legal documents on users' behalf — rather than merely emitting text. The harm is a capability claim outrunning the system, which is the non-adversarial failure mode this corpus tracks alongside attacks. Named plaintiff Jonathan Faridian. AI Incident Database incident 497.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "DoNotPay's "robot lawyer" sued in class action for generating substandard legal documents and unlicensed practice of law". AIR, AIR-2023-0005. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2023-0005/ (accessed 2026-10-19).