NEW DELHI: A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant on Tuesday expressed serious concern over a growing trend of lawyers filing petitions drafted with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, which contain even non-existent judgments.
As India hosts the world’s largest artificial intelligence conclave, the AI Impact Summit-2026, to make a big pitch for the new technology, the Supreme Court red-flagged its flip side.
“We have been alarmingly told that some lawyers have started using AI for drafting. It is absolutely uncalled for,” the CJI said, as he flagged the issue of growing use of AI in court filings without proper verification.
The other two judges in the bench—Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice B V Nagarathna—were also unhappy over the use of AI in drafting petitions. Justice Nagarathna pointed out that she recently came across a citation ‘Mercy v. Mankind’, which never existed. Echoing her, the CJI mentioned a similar instance that happened in Justice Dipankar Datta’s court. “Not one, series of such judgments were cited,” the CJI said.
Justice Nagarathna said, “This would be fine when and where the citation would be correct, but the fake quotes attributed to the judgment is a serious concern to the judges.” She said that it created an additional burden on the part of judges.
Last week also, Justice Nagarathna had raised similar concerns about the practice of citing fake quotations. Justice Bagchi said, “Now-a-days, the legal drafting has suffered a setback, as the special leave petitions today often consist merely of quotations from judgments.” Recalling about the past lawyers, he gave an example as to how earlier generation, like senior advocate Ashok Kumar Sen, was master in drafting, whose pleadings were precise, concise and original and believed to be some kind of great work.
The bench made the observations while hearing a PIL filed by academician Roop Rekha Verma seeking guidelines on political speeches. Recently, the Bombay High Court had imposed huge costs on a litigant for citing AI-generated fake citations during a hearing. The five-day artificial intelligence summit opened to packed halls and long queues on Monday, as tech moguls, industry leaders, policymakers, founders, and technologists thronged the Bharat Mandapam, where India is set to push for widening access to AI and seek international agreement on global AI commons.