LLMs Fabricate Legal Citations at High Rates for Saudi Law but Not GDPR, Study Finds

Jul 14, 2026

A new bilingual benchmark study shows that freely accessible large language models (LLMs) fabricate legal citations for Saudi data protection law (PDPL) in 60-77% of cases, while achieving near-perfect accuracy (94-100%) on the EU's GDPR. The research tested 120 questions in both Arabic and English across three models, revealing that fabrication rates are driven by the jurisdiction of the law, not the language of the query. The study also found that high model confidence does not prevent fabricated citations, highlighting a significant reliability gap.

Why it matters: This research highlights a critical jurisdiction-based reliability gap in LLM-generated legal citations, raising concerns for regulatory compliance and legal decision-making.

Full story at: arXiv Computers and Society ↗