New Delhi: 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 judgments 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 judgments were cited”.
Justice Nagarathna said that at times, the judgments 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.
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.
With huge billboards around the city welcoming the delegates, speakers and guests, Bharat Mandapam saw long queues much before the conference opened at 9.30 am on Monday, signalling people’s interest in the subject and the summit.
