This story was first published in Friday morning’s Daily Post. To get local news stories first, pick up the Post in the morning at 1,000 Mid-Peninsula locations.
BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
A family has dropped their lawsuit against the Palo Alto Unified School District that said a student was falsely accused of using Al to cheat.
The family’s attorney Evan Nelson said the student has transferred to a different school.
“When the response from PAUSD became further retaliation instead of introspection and an attempt to improve and grow, the family determined it was better to move to a different and better situation where the student’s superior talents would be appreciated and allowed to flourish,” Nelson said in an email to the Post. Takashi Kato and his son sued English teacher Sarah Bartlett, Assistant Principal Jerry Berk-son and Title IX Coordinator Robert Andrade.
Kato said his son turned in an essay on The Crucible on Nov. 13, 2025.
Bartlett allegedly said a plagiarism checker flagged the essay as 76% AI.
She required the student to rewrite the essay and docked his score to 65/100, the suit said.
Kato said he provided drafts, revision history, timestamps and notes that showed his son wrote the essay.
“Despite this evidence, the accusation of academic dishonesty was not withdrawn and was used to justify the compelled retake and resulting grade penalty,” the lawsuit said.
After Kato’s complaint, he said teachers increasingly scrutinized his son to justify the administration’s previous actions. His son ended up getting a B in the class.
Nelson said the lawsuit was never about the grade — the student has a 4.5 GPA — nor the money, because the family only demanded $150,000.
Due process lacking
Kato and his family came from another country and “had a very distinct expectation about the rights, freedoms and protections, including due process protections and fairness, that should exist here in the United States,” Nelson said. “When the experience at Paly proved lacking, they tried to correct it for all students past, present and future.”
Nelson said dozens of students have fallen victim to the false Al usage claims. The suit alleged that Asians and male students are more likely to get flagged.
Nelson agreed to drop the lawsuit on Wednesday (Sept. 2), court records show.
Kato, who graduated from college in Japan, founded an Al company based in Palo Alto in July 2024.
Everyone who works on LLM technology knows that detecting AI use is decidedly an inference (read: a GUESS). Pangram and its ilk cannot hold up in court. Schools should be responsible for terrorizing students this way. Really feel for the student and their family in this case.
Since we haven’t seen the essay and what was the alleged plagiarism I don’t think anybody reading this article can take an informed stance one way or the other. If the school believed that 76% of the work was done by AI and they reviewed it both with AI checking software and the human eye and they’re willing to stand by it then the only way that anybody’s going to know one way or the other is if this went to court and experts weighed in. Having revision history and other things does not make it less AI generated. I do think that dropping the lawsuit even should they choose to transfer signed a different School says a lot about how strong of a suit that actually was.
First, your statement is somewhat self-contradicting: you started by pointing out that since no one has read the essay, nobody should take a stance either way. But right after that, you gave your own opinion — that the parents dropping the lawsuit means the district has a strong case, insinuating that the student is guilty of plagiarism.
There are many reasons to drop a lawsuit that have nothing to do with guilt. It can be too costly and too draining, financially and emotionally. When facing a well-resourced school district like PAUSD, any individual family is deeply vulnerable — the imbalance in legal resources alone can force a retreat, regardless of the merits.