Supreme Court voices concern over growing ‘menace’ of citing AI-generated non-existent judgements

The Supreme Court has voiced concern over the growing “menace” of litigants and lawyers citing non-existent judgements generated by artificial intelligence.

A Bench comprising justices Rajesh Bindal and Vijay Bishnoi said the practice is becoming increasingly rampant across courts in India and throughout the world.

The observations were made by the top court while expunging remarks made by the Bombay High Court on a plea filed a director of a company.

“As a matter of indulgence, we expunge the remarks made in the aforesaid paragraph. However, the fact remains that this menace is rampant in all courts now, not only in India but throughout the world. Everyone needs to be careful about this. In fact, this court is already seized of this matter on judicial side,” the Bench said.

The High Court had noted in its order that the submissions of the appellant were generated using ChatGPT, including a judgement which had no citation in the real world.

“The respondent has filed written submissions in February 2025 and April 2025. From the overall tenor of the written submissions and a few give-away features, such as green-box tick-marks, bulletpoint-marks, repetitive submissions etc., this court strongly feels that the submissions are prepared using an AI tool such as ChatGPT or alike.

“A strong pointer is seen from a reference made to one alleged caselaw ‘Jyoti w/o Dinesh Tulsiani Vs. Elegant Associates’. Neither citation is given nor a copy of judgement is supplied by the respondent. This court and its law clerks were at pains to find out this caselaw but could not find. This has resulted in waste of precious judicial time,” the High Court had said.

It had said an AI tool can very well be used to aid research but there is a great responsibility on the parties to cross-verify the references and the materials generated by it.