SC concerned over lawyers using AI tools to file petitions
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 on Tuesday red-flagged its flip side. A top court bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant expressed serious concern over a growing trend of lawyers filing petitions drafted with AI tools that contain non-existent judgements such as ‘Mercy vs Mankind’.
“We are alarmed to reflect that some lawyers have started using AI to draft petitions. It is absolutely uncalled for,” the bench, also comprising Justices BV Nagarathna and Joymalya Bagchi, said. It made the observations while hearing a PIL filed by academician Roop Rekha Verma seeking guidelines on political speeches.
Justice Nagarathna said she recently came across a non-existent citation, ‘Mercy vs Mankind’. The CJI referred to a similar instance and said that in Justice Dipankar Datta’s court, “not one but a series of such judgements were cited”. Justice Nagarathna said that at times, the judgements referred to are correct, but fake quotes are attributed to those verdicts, making it very difficult to verify the contents. “It creates an additional burden on the judges,” Justice Nagarathna said.
Justice Bagchi, meanwhile, lamented the decline in the art of legal drafting and said many special leave petitions mostly comprise lengthy quotations from prior judgments, with little original articulation of legal grounds. Justice Nagarathna further pointed out that even where real judgments were referred to, the extracts placed before the court were sometimes incorrect. “Then some are citing real Supreme Court cases but those quoted portions do not even exist in the judgment,” she said.
