While high-profile failures have garnered the most attention, courts are using AI in ways that mostly fly under the radar. In a review of AI use in the courts, Daniel Ho, faculty director at Stanford’s RegLab, and former research fellow Helena Lyng-Olsen found AI was already being used in the judicial system for both administrative and judicial tasks.

There’s a “mistaken assumption … that ChatGPT or Claude are a lookup engine for American English, and that completely glosses over how these models are actually trained and tuned to provide the kind of output that Judge Newsom is getting on the platform,” says Stanford’s Ho, who co-authored a 2024 article on the subject in the Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology.

To make things even more complicated, that precedent is constantly changing as new rulings come in, a process it’s “unclear and undocumented” how systems handle, Ho tells The Verge. “Thus, deciding what to retrieve can be challenging in a legal setting,” the researchers write.