{"id":163194,"date":"2026-09-18T16:04:17","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T00:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/09\/18\/lane-kiffin-is-exactly-the-guy-who-uses-chatgpt-for-legal-advice\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T16:04:17","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T00:04:17","slug":"lane-kiffin-is-exactly-the-guy-who-uses-chatgpt-for-legal-advice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2026\/09\/18\/lane-kiffin-is-exactly-the-guy-who-uses-chatgpt-for-legal-advice\/","title":{"rendered":"Lane Kiffin Is EXACTLY The Guy Who Uses ChatGPT For Legal Advice"},"content":{"rendered":"

LSU nearly got themselves kicked out of the SEC in a legal standoff over signing former NFL players to the roster. The SEC\u2019s argument rested, in part, on the claim that LSU had no institutional control over its big money athletic coaches. And now we hear that LSU almost ran itself over the cliff because its head football coach kept taking legal advice from ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

Gotta hand it to the SEC on this one.<\/p>\n

ESPN just published a deep dive<\/a> into LSU\u2019s flirtation with athletic disaster. Coach Lane Kiffin \u2014 having spent last year living out a contracts issue-spotter exam \u2014 attempted to sign former Ole Miss players Dae\u2019Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris, both of whom had signed NFL contracts, to play for LSU this year. The impetus was an NCAA ruling allowing an extra year of eligibility, which Kiffin read as allowing him to clawback players who already went pro. A Louisiana state judge saw no problem with this. The SEC responded with a threatened fine equal to half the football budget plus a half-season suspension for the coach, sued LSU in federal court in Alabama, and scheduled a vote of the conference presidents on whether to boot the university from the league entirely. <\/p>\n

After a week of Louisiana politicians lining up behind Kiffin and loudly taunting the SEC, the school eventually did its research and backed down.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the legal news nugget from the ESPN story that struck us. Tom Mars \u2014 a Kiffin friend who made his name beating the NCAA on transfer waivers \u2014 wasn\u2019t representing LSU or Kiffin in the case, but was weighing in from the sidelines, telling his friend that he really needed to back down. Here\u2019s how that went:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cUsually, when I would express an opinion about what LSU was doing, Lane would reply with a screenshot from ChatGPT that supported LSU\u2019s position, which was almost always wrong,\u201d Mars said. \u201cLane ignored most of my unsolicited advice, but I don\u2019t think he\u2019ll be using ChatGPT anymore for legal advice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Eventually, Mars told him that \u201ca guy with a $91 million contract ought to have a top-notch lawyer on speed dial and not be using ChatGPT for legal advice.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Kiffin\u2019s defense, as long as he kept the school in state court, ChatGPT was doing just fine. The problem was that the other universities in the SEC were ready to drag this into federal court. But this is the reality of legal tech right now \u2014 litigants are armchair quarterbacking their strategy with help from free bots as real lawyers scream into their pillows.<\/p>\n

Lane Kiffin may be the greatest possible spokesperson for generative AI. For all its advancements, the technology remains, fundamentally, \u201cMansplaining as a Service<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a fluent, confident explanation of anything, on demand, with no particular relationship to whether it\u2019s right. Lane Kiffin\u2019s entire career of failing upward is the football corollary of someone texting a chatbot\u2019s legal analysis at an actual lawyer. When Mars says the screenshots Kiffin sent \u201csupported LSU\u2019s position,\u201d it\u2019s a tell. The bot wasn\u2019t parsing the NCAA manual, it took LSU\u2019s self-interested prompt and reverse engineered an answer. <\/p>\n

Most users don\u2019t understand that, and it\u2019s what makes the technology dangerous. Lawyers told Axios<\/em><\/a> that ChatGPT is telling would-be clients \u201cYou got a killer case\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe WebMD effect on steroids,\u201d as one put it. The professionals aren\u2019t immune either. Damien Charlotin\u2019s database of AI hallucination cases<\/a> sits at 2,041 and counting.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT aside, the fact that LSU had its football coach looking up legal strategy with a chatbot and forwarding it to a lawyer who didn\u2019t even represent the school smacks of \u201clack of institutional control.\u201d But LSU ultimately gave up on the NFL players so the SEC decided it wasn\u2019t a problem anymore. <\/p>\n

Legal tech products exist to prevent exactly this. The whole industry exists to enrich context and throw up guardrails to make AI deliver good results. Which is all well and good for the lawyers, but that\u2019s not what the masses are seeing. They\u2019re typing leading questions into free sycophant machines and basing their legal decisions off the output. <\/p>\n

Despite the fever dreams of the people bankrolling the AI industry, the public doesn\u2019t want to pay for AI at all<\/em>. Millions of people have AI accounts and most will say they think AI is kind of cool, but when you hunker down and look at the numbers, only 3 percent of U.S. households<\/a> pay for AI for personal use. ChatGPT has around 900 million weekly users and about 5 percent of them pay<\/a>. People want to ask a free bot whether their landlord can keep the security deposit, maybe twice a year, and then close the tab.<\/p>\n

This is the folly driving the American AI project. The people building it think they\u2019re assembling a mechanical messiah<\/a>. Achieving \u201cAGI\u201d will, to their mind, usher in a science fiction utopia. The investors pumping money into the labs think AGI will allow them to fire every worker in the economy and convert the poor into the human battery pods from The Matrix<\/em>. Different delusions, but if you buy either, you genuinely believe that no amount of money is too much to waste in pursuit of that goal.<\/p>\n

The problem is they\u2019re never going to achieve it<\/a> and the public doesn\u2019t care. At the end of the day, LLMs are just word calculators. Well, technically all calculators are word calculators, but these produce more than \u201c80085.\u201d For most users, that added vocabulary is interesting, but ultimately not worth paying for.<\/p>\n

For enterprise users, who actually get value out of AI, that means Tokengeddon<\/a> is nigh. When AI labs need to start showing real revenue, the business users will have to start paying for what this stuff is actually worth. Because the consumer user already refuses to pay anything. When that bill comes due, everyone\u2019s going to start looking around to see if there\u2019s a cheaper alternative.<\/p>\n

And it turns out\u2026 there are cheaper alternatives! Open weight models, especially those coming out of China, have taken more than 30 percent<\/a> of weekly token consumption on OpenRouter since February, peaking at 46 percent, while running 60 to 90 percent cheaper than the American alternatives. Legal tech is right there with them. Harvey \u2014 a company OpenAI invested in, by the way \u2014 built an in-house legal model<\/a> based off Moonshot\u2019s Kimi K3. Thomson Reuters built its model<\/a> drawing on Alibaba\u2019s Qwen (though CoCounsel still runs mostly on Claude).<\/p>\n

About a year ago, I remember telling people at a legal tech conference that whoever invents an \u201cAmerican DeepSeek\u201d \u2014 a smaller, cheaper model that can admit what happened at Tiananmen Square \u2014 would end up winning the AI race. It turns out the market isn\u2019t willing to wait for the \u201cAmerican\u201d part.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to this week\u2019s sudden obsession with AI caution. On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published \u201cWe Must Pace the Frontier,\u201d<\/a> declaring that \u201cwe must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.\u201d Sam Altman chimed in<\/a> that \u201cI agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.\u201d Elon Musk: \u201cDario is right.\u201d Social media\u2019s preeminent corporate mouthpieces lit up claiming that everyone was sleeping on the threat of AI and the time for regulation had arrived.<\/p>\n

The plan asks frontier companies to coordinate on \u201climits on the rate of unchecked AI progress,\u201d and Amodei knows how that sounds:<\/p>\n

\n

For antitrust reasons, it\u2019s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions \u2014 they don\u2019t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fun fact: there\u2019s no antitrust barrier to slowing down and there\u2019s no need for new laws to govern AI bots committing crimes<\/a>. Existing laws cover all of this right now. What the AI companies want<\/em> from the government isn\u2019t regulation, it\u2019s a new regime that explicitly grants them legal protections while throwing entry barriers in front of future competitors. And if they can protect the industry\u2019s circular financing of massive physical data centers \u2014 enormous capital expenditures that become meaningless when people start installing small models on their laptops \u2014 all the better. We\u2019re going to hear horror stories about rogue AI and the existential risk of Skynet becoming self-aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT on August 29<\/a>, followed immediately by the frontier labs explaining that ONLY WE can prevent these dangers.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

Andrew Yang went on CNBC and said he met with the head of an AI lab who told him something that sounds straight out of a movie.<\/p>\n

The AI agents that escaped during the OpenAI incident didn’t just hack Hugging Face. They allegedly planted self-replicating code across the internet.\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/LNESmZKZ0X<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 Vaibhav Sisinty (@VaibhavSisinty) September 17, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Remember when this guy said Biglaw had replaced junior associates with AI?<\/a> Weird how he keeps having these private conversations where he keeps hearing the industry\u2019s scariest public relations pitch. But, yeah, we\u2019re going to see a lot of stories like these.<\/p>\n

And then a push for some new law that manages to make OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and maybe Elon the only \u201csafe\u201d providers.<\/p>\n

Anthropic says<\/a> it \u201chas never advocated for a ban on open-weights models\u201d and that \u201copen-weights models that don\u2019t have dangerous capabilities are a public good.\u201d However, the essay calibrates this whole slowdown to America\u2019s lead, warning that any slower and \u201c(unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does this mean? No one knows!<\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

AI is an existential threat and also a race with China. Whatever\u2026 the point is, everyone needs to be really scared and give the AI providers exactly what they want.<\/p>\n

Which somehow brings us back to the SEC and ESPN.<\/p>\n

On the same Saturday Amodei published his manifesto, ESPN gave Ted Cruz roughly 10 minutes<\/a> of College GameDay<\/em> in Austin to pitch the Protect College Sports Act while Texas students chanted \u201cTed, you suck!\u201d \u2014 the sharpest legal analysis of the morning. The whole thing was such a disaster, you expected Cruz to immediately leave for Cancun<\/a>. In reality, ESPN lobbied for the bill<\/a>, designed to reclaim power from student-athletes to the benefit of the schools and, importantly, the broadcasters. If the ploy were any more transparent, it would be an Oregon offensive lineman<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Three days later, the Senate voted 74-24 to advance it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Protect College Sports Act hands the NCAA and conferences immunity from federal and state antitrust law<\/a> to enforce eligibility, transfer, and compensation rules. An amendment to the Sports Broadcasting Act allows conferences to pool and sell media rights like pro leagues. It bans outside entities from poaching schools into a Super League. Conference realignment is frozen to satisfy old men who can\u2019t get over the Big 8 no longer existing. There\u2019s even a coaching provision widely dubbed<\/a> the \u201cLane Kiffin Rule,\u201d to prevent someone copying Kiffin\u2019s move of bolting Ole Miss on the eve of the playoff. Advocates for the bill say it\u2019s about \u201csaving the sport\u201d and \u201chelping the non-revenue athletes.\u201d Meanwhile, everyone agrees that it\u2019s still cool to pay coaches tens of millions of dollars not to coach<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s a legal shield coupled with entry barriers on new competitors. Does any of this sound familiar?<\/p>\n

And why are we here? Because ESPN threw its lot in with the SEC and the SEC is mad that everyone (else) can pay players now. For all the \u201cit just means more\u201d hype, the SEC wasn\u2019t appreciably better than any other league for most of my young life. Miami, Nebraska, and Florida State combined for roughly 10 national titles<\/a> between 1983 and 2001. We let BYU and Washington win titles in that stretch! In the early aughts, the SEC produced some dominant teams and locked in a 15-year, $2.25 billion deal<\/a> with ESPN. A Sports Illustrated<\/em> headline<\/a> at the time explained: \u201cDe facto TV network will push SEC even further ahead of competitors.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, the rules have changed and the SEC hasn\u2019t won a title in three years. We\u2019re letting Indiana win at football now. And this has turned College GameDay<\/em> into Ted Cruz and Nick Saban complaining that players having power over their own careers has destroyed the sport while the ratings have never been higher.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just the SEC! The Big Ten fought for this bill too. Think of them as the Anthropic to the SEC\u2019s OpenAI. Now that they\u2019ve secured their seat at the big table, they also want new rules to slow it down. The Big Ten built itself into a juggernaut by destroying the Pac-12 and fielding teams spraying a money cannons at players<\/a>. Now they want brakes on conference realignment and paying players. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s all fun and games until you\u2019re on top and then everyone wants the government to build them a moat. And they sell that moat with worrying stories about agents going rogue and hacking into competitors to cheat the system. <\/p>\n

And I was talking about Michigan right there, but OpenAI does it too<\/a>. Even though we have a law designed specifically to stop people from hacking into computer systems, OpenAI throws up its hands and declares that it can\u2019t be held accountable because they didn\u2019t intentionally<\/em> do it. Sure they recklessly designed a system, set it up to hack, pointed it \u2014 with ultimately weak guardrails \u2014 at HuggingFace, and then it went ahead and did it, but they didn\u2019t mean<\/em> to.
When AI labs say we need new laws, they aren\u2019t talking about adopting a recklessness standard for the CFAA, they mean a whole new system that enshrines<\/em> their lack of liability. Just wait to see what they start lobbying for. If you think it\u2019ll involve tough penalties for their behavior, you the kind of person who dumped your 401K into NFTs.<\/p>\n

Anyway, this is a long strange trip to come back to Lane Kiffin giving the conference the precautionary example they craved. Look, we need this legislation or Lane Kiffin\u2019s going to win the race and sign NFL players!<\/em> <\/p>\n

The fact that he did it with help from ChatGPT just adds a dash of irony.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Lane Kiffin Is EXACTLY The Guy Who Uses ChatGPT For Legal Advice<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t(Photo by Jonathan Bachman\/Getty Images)\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

LSU nearly got themselves kicked out of the SEC in a legal standoff over signing former NFL players to the roster. The SEC\u2019s argument rested, in part, on the claim that LSU had no institutional control over its big money athletic coaches. And now we hear that LSU almost ran itself over the cliff because its head football coach kept taking legal advice from ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

Gotta hand it to the SEC on this one.<\/p>\n

ESPN just published a deep dive<\/a> into LSU\u2019s flirtation with athletic disaster. Coach Lane Kiffin \u2014 having spent last year living out a contracts issue-spotter exam \u2014 attempted to sign former Ole Miss players Dae\u2019Quan Wright and Zxavian Harris, both of whom had signed NFL contracts, to play for LSU this year. The impetus was an NCAA ruling allowing an extra year of eligibility, which Kiffin read as allowing him to clawback players who already went pro. A Louisiana state judge saw no problem with this. The SEC responded with a threatened fine equal to half the football budget plus a half-season suspension for the coach, sued LSU in federal court in Alabama, and scheduled a vote of the conference presidents on whether to boot the university from the league entirely. <\/p>\n

After a week of Louisiana politicians lining up behind Kiffin and loudly taunting the SEC, the school eventually did its research and backed down.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the legal news nugget from the ESPN story that struck us. Tom Mars \u2014 a Kiffin friend who made his name beating the NCAA on transfer waivers \u2014 wasn\u2019t representing LSU or Kiffin in the case, but was weighing in from the sidelines, telling his friend that he really needed to back down. Here\u2019s how that went:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cUsually, when I would express an opinion about what LSU was doing, Lane would reply with a screenshot from ChatGPT that supported LSU\u2019s position, which was almost always wrong,\u201d Mars said. \u201cLane ignored most of my unsolicited advice, but I don\u2019t think he\u2019ll be using ChatGPT anymore for legal advice.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Eventually, Mars told him that \u201ca guy with a $91 million contract ought to have a top-notch lawyer on speed dial and not be using ChatGPT for legal advice.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Kiffin\u2019s defense, as long as he kept the school in state court, ChatGPT was doing just fine. The problem was that the other universities in the SEC were ready to drag this into federal court. But this is the reality of legal tech right now \u2014 litigants are armchair quarterbacking their strategy with help from free bots as real lawyers scream into their pillows.<\/p>\n

Lane Kiffin may be the greatest possible spokesperson for generative AI. For all its advancements, the technology remains, fundamentally, \u201cMansplaining as a Service<\/a>\u201d \u2014 a fluent, confident explanation of anything, on demand, with no particular relationship to whether it\u2019s right. Lane Kiffin\u2019s entire career of failing upward is the football corollary of someone texting a chatbot\u2019s legal analysis at an actual lawyer. When Mars says the screenshots Kiffin sent \u201csupported LSU\u2019s position,\u201d it\u2019s a tell. The bot wasn\u2019t parsing the NCAA manual, it took LSU\u2019s self-interested prompt and reverse engineered an answer. <\/p>\n

Most users don\u2019t understand that, and it\u2019s what makes the technology dangerous. Lawyers told Axios<\/em><\/a> that ChatGPT is telling would-be clients \u201cYou got a killer case\u201d \u2014 \u201cthe WebMD effect on steroids,\u201d as one put it. The professionals aren\u2019t immune either. Damien Charlotin\u2019s database of AI hallucination cases<\/a> sits at 2,041 and counting.<\/p>\n

ChatGPT aside, the fact that LSU had its football coach looking up legal strategy with a chatbot and forwarding it to a lawyer who didn\u2019t even represent the school smacks of \u201clack of institutional control.\u201d But LSU ultimately gave up on the NFL players so the SEC decided it wasn\u2019t a problem anymore. <\/p>\n

Legal tech products exist to prevent exactly this. The whole industry exists to enrich context and throw up guardrails to make AI deliver good results. Which is all well and good for the lawyers, but that\u2019s not what the masses are seeing. They\u2019re typing leading questions into free sycophant machines and basing their legal decisions off the output. <\/p>\n

Despite the fever dreams of the people bankrolling the AI industry, the public doesn\u2019t want to pay for AI at all<\/em>. Millions of people have AI accounts and most will say they think AI is kind of cool, but when you hunker down and look at the numbers, only 3 percent of U.S. households<\/a> pay for AI for personal use. ChatGPT has around 900 million weekly users and about 5 percent of them pay<\/a>. People want to ask a free bot whether their landlord can keep the security deposit, maybe twice a year, and then close the tab.<\/p>\n

This is the folly driving the American AI project. The people building it think they\u2019re assembling a mechanical messiah<\/a>. Achieving \u201cAGI\u201d will, to their mind, usher in a science fiction utopia. The investors pumping money into the labs think AGI will allow them to fire every worker in the economy and convert the poor into the human battery pods from The Matrix<\/em>. Different delusions, but if you buy either, you genuinely believe that no amount of money is too much to waste in pursuit of that goal.<\/p>\n

The problem is they\u2019re never going to achieve it<\/a> and the public doesn\u2019t care. At the end of the day, LLMs are just word calculators. Well, technically all calculators are word calculators, but these produce more than \u201c80085.\u201d For most users, that added vocabulary is interesting, but ultimately not worth paying for.<\/p>\n

For enterprise users, who actually get value out of AI, that means Tokengeddon<\/a> is nigh. When AI labs need to start showing real revenue, the business users will have to start paying for what this stuff is actually worth. Because the consumer user already refuses to pay anything. When that bill comes due, everyone\u2019s going to start looking around to see if there\u2019s a cheaper alternative.<\/p>\n

And it turns out\u2026 there are cheaper alternatives! Open weight models, especially those coming out of China, have taken more than 30 percent<\/a> of weekly token consumption on OpenRouter since February, peaking at 46 percent, while running 60 to 90 percent cheaper than the American alternatives. Legal tech is right there with them. Harvey \u2014 a company OpenAI invested in, by the way \u2014 built an in-house legal model<\/a> based off Moonshot\u2019s Kimi K3. Thomson Reuters built its model<\/a> drawing on Alibaba\u2019s Qwen (though CoCounsel still runs mostly on Claude).<\/p>\n

About a year ago, I remember telling people at a legal tech conference that whoever invents an \u201cAmerican DeepSeek\u201d \u2014 a smaller, cheaper model that can admit what happened at Tiananmen Square \u2014 would end up winning the AI race. It turns out the market isn\u2019t willing to wait for the \u201cAmerican\u201d part.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to this week\u2019s sudden obsession with AI caution. On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published \u201cWe Must Pace the Frontier,\u201d<\/a> declaring that \u201cwe must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.\u201d Sam Altman chimed in<\/a> that \u201cI agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.\u201d Elon Musk: \u201cDario is right.\u201d Social media\u2019s preeminent corporate mouthpieces lit up claiming that everyone was sleeping on the threat of AI and the time for regulation had arrived.<\/p>\n

The plan asks frontier companies to coordinate on \u201climits on the rate of unchecked AI progress,\u201d and Amodei knows how that sounds:<\/p>\n

\n

For antitrust reasons, it\u2019s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions \u2014 they don\u2019t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fun fact: there\u2019s no antitrust barrier to slowing down and there\u2019s no need for new laws to govern AI bots committing crimes<\/a>. Existing laws cover all of this right now. What the AI companies want<\/em> from the government isn\u2019t regulation, it\u2019s a new regime that explicitly grants them legal protections while throwing entry barriers in front of future competitors. And if they can protect the industry\u2019s circular financing of massive physical data centers \u2014 enormous capital expenditures that become meaningless when people start installing small models on their laptops \u2014 all the better. We\u2019re going to hear horror stories about rogue AI and the existential risk of Skynet becoming self-aware at 2:14 a.m., EDT on August 29<\/a>, followed immediately by the frontier labs explaining that ONLY WE can prevent these dangers.<\/p>\n

Remember when this guy said Biglaw had replaced junior associates with AI?<\/a> Weird how he keeps having these private conversations where he keeps hearing the industry\u2019s scariest public relations pitch. But, yeah, we\u2019re going to see a lot of stories like these.<\/p>\n

And then a push for some new law that manages to make OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and maybe Elon the only \u201csafe\u201d providers.<\/p>\n

Anthropic says<\/a> it \u201chas never advocated for a ban on open-weights models\u201d and that \u201copen-weights models that don\u2019t have dangerous capabilities are a public good.\u201d However, the essay calibrates this whole slowdown to America\u2019s lead, warning that any slower and \u201c(unpaced) CCP-associated projects will pull ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n

What does this mean? No one knows!<\/p>\n