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.
