On Thursday, a federal appeals court took a Mississippi case away from the judge who had been handling it, after concluding that his rulings were marred by errors produced with artificial intelligence. The case is about a 2025 state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs in public schools and universities. Teachers, professors, students and the Mississippi Association of Educators sued, and in the summer of 2025 Judge Henry Wingate blocked the law. His first order named people who were not part of the lawsuit, pointed to statements that did not exist in the case file and misquoted the law itself. Wingate later said a law clerk had used Perplexity, a chatbot that searches the web and writes answers, as a “foundational drafting assistant,” and that a draft was filed before anyone in his office had checked it.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals canceled the later order that kept the law on hold and sent the case to a different judge. Judge Jerry Smith, who wrote the decision, pointed to the AI mistakes and the errors of law in Wingate’s rulings. The state had argued that an invented case citation survived even in the corrected version. The appeals court did not decide whether the law itself is constitutional. That question now goes to a new judge, and while it is argued again, the ban is no longer blocked in Mississippi’s schools and colleges.