Supreme Court concerned over lawyers using artificial intelligence to file pleas

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 B V 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’.
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.