The Supreme Court of India has threatened to sanction a lower court judge for issuing a judgment based on fake judgments generated by artificial intelligence.
According to the BBC, the issue began in August 2025, when a junior civil judge in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, who has not been publicly named, delivered a judgment on a disputed property.
The judge dismissed the defendant’s objections during trial, citing four prior legal rulings on the case, all of which were later found to have been made up by AI.
Subsequently, the defendant filed an appeal with the state’s high court, arguing that the orders cited were fake, a claim the court acknowledged but upheld the judge’s ruling.
The high court stated that the judge had only made the error in “good faith”.
“The citations may be non-existent, but if the learned trial court has considered the correct principles of law and its application to the facts of the case is also correct, mere mentioning of incorrect or non-existent rulings/citations in the order cannot be a ground to set aside the order,” the high court wrote.
When questioned by the high court about the incident, the junior judge said it was her time to use AI-generated rulings, stressing that they believed the judgments were genuine and had no ulterior motive to deliberately misrepresent or misquote the verdict.
This prompted the defendant to challenge the verdict at the country’s Supreme Court, which ordered a stay on the execution of the lower court’s judgment on the property dispute, arguing that the use of AI to write an opinion was “an error in decision making” but an act of “misconduct”.
Additionally, the apex court said it would conduct a comprehensive review of the case and issued notices to the country’s attorney and solicitor general, and the Bar Council of India.
