The Supreme Court’s Draft AI Regulations: Are India’s courts ready to keep their promises?

THE SUPREME COURT OF INDIA’S Draft Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026 (‘Draft Regulations’) are based on five principles: human primacy, transparency, accountability, data protection, and judicial independence. These principles visibly translate through the Draft Regulations in the general principles which deal with governing AI systems, permissible and prohibited use of AI, institutional architecture, oversight architecture, procurement, data protection, training programmes, and grievance redressal.

The Draft Regulations use a careful vocabulary with their framers clearly alive to what can go wrong when AI enters adjudication. But what they do less well, and what this piece argues, is reckon with what it will actually take for an Indian judiciary of uneven technical capacity, spanning the Supreme Court down to tribunals and statutory commissions, to deliver on what they propose.

This piece does not highlight what the Draft Regulations say in its entirety, which is accounted for in my companion explainer. It follows what assumes that reading and asks a difficult question: whether the Indian Supreme Court’s Draft Regulations on the use of AI in courts have the institutional weight to uphold the promises it makes?

The infrastructure question precedes the regulatory one

Every provision under the Draft Regulations creates certain obligatory functions, assuming the required capacity to discharge them. It is largely silent on where that capacity will originate from. For instance, Regulation 38 of the Draft Regulations requires periodic in-house technical, legal, and ethical AI audits. This sounds like a thoughtful security position, but it also presumes that AI secretariats will possess the expertise to audit AI systems unaided.

District courts in several states are still building reliable case management software. At this backdrop, the proposal of initiating in-house AI auditing is not simply a small requirement. It does not say about where the capacity of in-house AI auditing will come from; all that it says is that AI auditing is a must.

Who governs the Apex Body?

The Draft Regulations envision an oversight structure comprising an Apex Body, AI Committees, AI Secretariats, and a Centre of Research and Excellence on Artificial Intelligence. This tier-ed structure, in compact form, has the power to approve, audit, direct remedial measures, and suspend a non-compliant system.

By the Draft Regulations, the Apex Body at the Supreme Court shall set the minimum mandatory standards for AI use across all courts in India. Under Regulation 57, the Supreme Court AI committee has the task of periodically reviewing these Draft Regulations, folding self-review into the body whose decisions are most consequential.

AI governance errors are frequently invisible until someone with technical literacy looks for them. The Draft Regulations have left open, rather than answered, who monitors the gap in the oversight structure when there’s an error.

There is nothing in the Draft Regulations that requires an external audit of the Apex Body’s own judgment calls. There is no independent technical Ombudsperson outside the proposed institutional hierarchy. In some sense, courts have been self-reviewing and with jurisdiction under Articles 32 and 226 of the Constitution, remain available in principle, and so the absence of an external audit is not necessarily fatal.

Literacy and training are two different things

The Draft Regulations require regular and structured training for judges, advocates, and court staff, on the technical, legal and ethical dimensions of AI, at a minimum, addressing the functioning, capabilities and limitations of AI systems: the identification and mitigation of AI bias, hallucinations and technical errors; the legal and ethical framework governing AI in judicial context, including the rights of litigants and the obligations of judicial officers under these regulations; data protection principles, cybersecurity awareness and the handling of sensitive judicial data; and the correct procedure for reporting AI incidents, raising concerns and utilizing grievance literacy mechanisms.

This seems to be a credible curriculum, but not without a stronger guarantee of competence. UNESCO’s 2024 Global Judges’ Initiative: survey on the use of AI systems by judicial operators found that only nine per cent of operators who had used AI tools had received any related training, even as forty-four per cent were already using such tools. This is a gap between exposure and literacy that a static curriculum cannot close.