Science and Technology › Computing and AI

AI governance, safety and ethics

How artificial intelligence is governed: national and international rules, safety and the risks of frontier models, deepfakes, copyright, bias, liability and autonomous weapons. Prelims has asked about the AI Action Summit in Paris.

UPSC has asked

Prelims 2025: the AI Action Summit held in Paris

Showing 1 of 7 articles, those that changed from 1 to 30 June 2026.Show all

AI in courts: the draft 2026 Regulations

Prelims and Mains

The draft Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026, prepared by the Supreme Court's AI Committee, are a 57 regulation framework for every court and tribunal in India.

Regulation 4 makes AI strictly assistive and subservient to human judgement.
Regulation 20 lists prohibited uses as absolute and non derogable, including risk scoring for flight risk, recidivism, bail eligibility or witness credibility; Regulation 56 bars the Apex Body from relaxing it.
Permitted uses include transcription, translation, legal research, scheduling, accessibility services and chatbots.
The ban traces to the Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS), a US recidivism tool found to misclassify Black defendants, and SyRI, a Dutch welfare risk scoring system struck down in 2020 on privacy grounds.

Oversight chain

Supreme Court Apex Body
Sets the framework and may not relax the prohibited uses
High Court AI Secretariats
Keep the AI Register and Incident Database, run audits and publish transparency reports
High Court AI Committees
Hear grievances from litigants about AI use in their cases

Oversight runs down from the Supreme Court to every High Court, and a litigant's complaint runs up through the same chain.Source: Frontline, 16 June 2026

What changed

16 Jun 2026New
- The draft was released on 3 June; about 52 million cases were pending across the judiciary as of mid 2026.
Mains: The bans are strong on paper but the oversight machinery is unfunded and beyond the capacity of district courts, and a High Court AI Secretariat must judge vendors' own descriptions of their tools, so a risk tool could be rebranded as a scheduling aid.
Frontline, 16 Jun 2026: A firewall against algorithmic justice (opens in a new tab)

Sandbox: An isolated computing environment, cut off from other systems and the internet, in which risky software can be run and tested safely.

Risk based regulation: Rules scaled to the harm a technology could cause, so the strictest duties fall on the riskiest uses.

Conformity assessment: The process of showing that a product meets legal standards before it is put on the market.

Watermark: A hidden, machine readable signal embedded in content to show that a machine generated it.

Synthetically generated information: Audio, image or video artificially or algorithmically created or altered so that it appears real and is likely to be taken for a real person or a real event.

Metadata: Data carried alongside a file that records where it came from and how it was made.

Jailbreak: A method of bypassing an AI model's safeguards.

Covered frontier model: Under the US order, an advanced model that qualifies for voluntary pre release government testing.

Data sovereignty: A country seeking control over data originating within its borders.