(Originally published by Lawfare on August 20, 2026.)

On July 7, 2025, appellate lawyer Adam Unikowsky published a provocative claim on Substack: “a robot lawyer would be an above-average Supreme Court advocate.” He had given Claude Opus 4 the briefs and key precedents from Williams v. Reed, a case he had recently argued before the Court, and asked the model to answer the justices’ actual questions. Producing the audio required substantial editing, and Claude sometimes missed what a question was getting at. Still, the result was striking: Many of Claude’s answers sounded plausible, and its emulation (through other software) of Unikowsky’s voice was eerily on point.

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