Two Supreme Court Rulings in 2026 Set Aside Orders Built on Fake AI Citations, While Indian Courts Use AI for Translation and Transcription and the Court's Draft AI Rules Are Still Not Final

On 2 September 2026 a Supreme Court bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Sheel Nagu set aside a customs penalty of Rs 425,27,99,100, about Rs 425 crore, after checking the officer’s cited cases itself. Its order says some of those cases do not exist or carry fake citations, and others are real but do not say what the order claims. It was the second ruling in two months to void an order for that reason.

The Supreme Court also uses AI to translate judgments and transcribe hearings, and since June 2026 it has been taking comments on draft rules for AI in courts. This piece sets out what court and government documents say each tool does, what it does not do, and where the documents disagree.

What the Supreme Court says its tools do

A Lok Sabha reply by Minister of State for Law and Justice Arjun Ram Meghwal, published by PIB on 25 July 2025, lists the Court’s AI uses. Software transcribes oral arguments in Constitution Bench cases. With the National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Court translates judgments from English into 18 Indian languages. That tool is SUVAS, the Supreme Court Vidhik Anuvaad Software. With IIT Madras the Court has built a tool that flags defects in electronic filings, and its prototype had been opened to 200 Advocates-on-Record, the lawyers who sign and file pleadings in the Supreme Court.

PIB’s backgrounder of 11 February 2026 adds that transcription is spreading to regular hearing days, with final validation done by humans.

Two tools are less settled. The 2025 reply says SUPACE, a system meant to pick out the facts of a case and search precedents, is “in experimental stage of development” and may be deployed after the Court buys GPUs and TPUs. The February 2026 backgrounder says it is “not yet deployed for regular judicial use”. The Court’s own white paper of November 2025 describes SUPACE as a platform that analyses case records and extracts key precedents, without mentioning that status.

The other is LegRAA, the Legal Research Analysis Assistant, built by NIC’s AI Division and the Centre of Excellence for eCourts in Pune. A government reply to the Lok Sabha on 31 July 2026, as Tech Observer reported it, still called LegRAA a pilot. The backgrounder says it has no role in recommending outcomes or drafting judgments.

The documents disagree in places. PIB counts 18 languages for SUVAS, while the white paper says it translated about 36,000 judgments into 19 languages in 2023. One sentence in the 2025 reply says the tools “are being used by the Supreme Court of India in decision making process”. Every other official document says the reverse, so tuput reads it as a missing “not”, though it could not confirm that with the ministry.

Rs 53.57 crore out of Rs 7,210 crore

The eCourts Phase III scheme, run by the Department of Justice, has an outlay of Rs 7,210 crore. A Rajya Sabha annexure of 7 December 2023 splits it into line items, one of which is “Future Technological Advancements” at Rs 53.57 crore. A Lok Sabha reply reported on 19 December 2025 describes that line as covering AI and blockchain. It is 0.74 per cent of the total, by tuput’s arithmetic.

The same reply said no formal policy or guidelines exist yet for adopting AI in judicial processes. It said AI runs only in controlled pilots inside the areas the project report approves, and that each High Court’s own rules govern its use. The Supreme Court’s eCommittee formed a sub-committee of six High Court judges and technical experts on data security, and reported no systemic bias or other issues in the pilots. tuput found no published audit behind that statement.

On 10 December 2025 Chief Justice Surya Kant reconstituted the Supreme Court’s AI Committee under Justice P S Narasimha, to oversee AI tools in the Supreme Court and the lower courts.

High Courts draw the line in different places

The Kerala High Court’s policy for its district judiciary is dated 19 July 2025. It bars AI tools from being used to arrive at any finding, relief, order or judgment. Officers must avoid cloud-based AI services unless approved, verify what approved tools produce, legal citations included, and keep an audit record of each use.

A Kerala memorandum of 21 October 2025 then made the Adalat.AI speech-to-text tool mandatory for recording witness depositions in all the state’s courts from 1 November 2025. The High Court bars AI from deciding cases and requires it for typing testimony.

The Gujarat High Court’s policy, reported by Bar and Bench on 4 April 2026, also bars AI from drafting judgments and orders, bail and sentencing, and from sorting or evaluating evidence. It allows legal research verified against sources such as the Supreme Court website, and treats a breach as misconduct.

The Supreme Court’s draft rules

The Supreme Court’s AI Committee published draft Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026 on 3 June 2026 and asked for comments by 20 June. A notice of 16 June moved the deadline to 15 July. The draft would cover the Supreme Court, High Courts, lower courts and tribunals, each taking effect on a date its chief justice fixes.

Regulation 4 says AI must “at all times remain strictly subservient to human judgment”. Regulation 20 bars any outcome reached by AI alone and bars AI risk scoring for flight risk, recidivism, bail eligibility or witness credibility. Regulation 43 requires a party who used AI in a pleading to file a declaration, and says a person who files AI-fabricated material cannot cite the AI as a defence.

The Internet Freedom Foundation’s comments of 15 July 2026 back the Regulation 20 bans. They object to Regulations 16 and 17, which presume in favour of adopting AI unless proved otherwise, and to Regulation 22(2)(e), which seats a MeitY joint secretary on the apex body. The Supreme Court’s order of 2 September 2026 says the regulations “are yet to be finalised”.

Three Supreme Court orders on invented case law

Chatbots can produce convincing text that is simply made up, and the Supreme Court has now dealt three times with what follows when that text reaches an order.

On 27 February 2026 Justices Narasimha and Alok Aradhe took notice of a trial court order of 19 August 2025 that relied on four decisions the petitioners said do not exist. The Andhra Pradesh High Court had noted they looked AI-generated but dismissed the revision petition. The Supreme Court said reliance on such decisions would be misconduct and not an error, issued notice to the Attorney General, the Solicitor General and the Bar Council of India, and appointed senior advocate Shyam Divan to assist.

On 2 July 2026, in Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank, the same bench set aside an NCLT order of 28 August 2024 and an NCLAT order of 11 September 2025 in an insolvency case against Essel Infraprojects. Paragraph 15 of the judgment checks the six authorities the NCLT cited. Three citations do not exist, one is the wrong citation for a real judgment, and two are real citations with paragraphs that do not exist. The bank’s affidavit said its counsel did not cite them at the hearing and that the NCLT found them through its own research.

The Court held that citing unverified AI material is misconduct for an advocate and a serious lapse for a judge, and that a decision resting on it is “no decision in the eyes of the law”. It directed the Bar Council of India to form a committee to prescribe a guiding principle and disciplinary action, and said the judgment does not touch the rightful use of AI. tuput did not find a Bar Council notice constituting the committee.

The Gadiya order of 2 September 2026 repeated that holding. Justice Datta wrote that “assistance can never be substituted for adjudication” and that AI “may well serve as training wheels but entrusting it with the pilot’s seat would be both imprudent and dangerous.” The Court set aside the customs order of 8 October 2025 and the Gujarat High Court order of 20 January 2026 that had upheld it. A fresh decision goes to another officer of the same rank, and action against the officer who wrote the original order is left to that officer’s appointing authority.

Bhashini outside the courts

Outside the courts, the best-documented government tool is Bhashini, the language platform of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). PIB’s February 2026 backgrounder says it has passed 1.2 million downloads since July 2022, supports 36 or more languages, integrates over 350 AI models and has 450 or more active customers. The Court’s white paper says courts use Bhashini to turn speech into text and to make audio versions of documents, in one sentence with no figures. Our earlier pieces cover Bhashini and Indian-language AI and the money behind the IndiaAI Mission.

What the record does not show

None of the documents above gives an error rate for SUVAS, the transcription tool or the e-filing checker. The 31 July 2026 reply, as Tech Observer reports it, says future use of LegRAA and Digital Courts 2.1 will be governed by the rules and policies of the Supreme Court and the High Courts. The comment window on the draft rules closed on 15 July 2026, and on 2 September the Supreme Court still called the regulations yet to be finalised.