Al to assist and not to decide equities: Chief Justice of India Surya Kant
Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Saturday (July 11, 2026) clarified that Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be used only for procedural convenience and not
Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Saturday (July 11, 2026) clarified that Artificial Intelligence (AI) should be used only for procedural convenience and not in actual judging. The role of AI is only that of an assistant, and not a judge. The ’s caution comes amid recent judgments and observations from within the highest court about the dangers on blind reliance on AI. Earlier this month, a Bench headed by Justice P.S. Narasimha found that a Tribunal had relied on AI-hallucinated verdicts to decide a real case. The apex court advocated ‘zero-tolerance’ to blind reliance on machine intelligence, while highlighting that such sloppiness would spell catastrophe to the judicial process itself.
In recent months, Supreme Court judges, including Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Dipankar Datta, have remarked in open court that they encountered AI-generated hallucinations and citations to non-existent case laws in legal petitions, including a fictitious case titled ‘Mercy versus Mankind’. Cautious embrace Chief Justice Kant said the real question that needed to be asked was not whether India should embrace these tools or not. The indicated that the pertinent point of discussion should be the need for legislative clarity and human oversight. “The embracing exercise is already under way and cannot sensibly be resisted. It is whether we build the legislative clarity and the human oversight that ensures these platforms widen access to justice rather than narrow it, for exactly the people least equipped to question an algorithm’s output,” Chief Justice Kant said in his address at a summit organised by the Indian Institute of Arbitration and Mediation.
Drawing the line on the use of AI in justice administration, the said that AI may triage a dispute, organise evidence, or draft a first translation. “But the moment it begins to weigh one party’s equities against that of another, it has stopped assisting and started deciding, and no algorithm has yet earned the ability or authority to do that quietly,” the said. The Chief Justice said the honest answer to whether digital dispute resolution and AI enhance or disrupt access to justice was that “they will do both, depending on how deliberately we design their use”. The Chief Justice emphasised that synthetic intelligence tools should not decide disputes.
Recent technological interventions in the Supreme Court are limited to assisting judges with legal research and case summarisation or translation of judgments to regional languages. They remain “deliberately assistive rather than adjudicatory”, the underscored.
The BriefWire