US Judiciary Prepares New AI Guidance for Federal Courts

New recommendations could be developed within the next year, according to Reuters, citing US Circuit Judge Sidney Thomas, who leads a federal judiciary task force examining generative AI. The effort comes as courts increasingly encounter AI both in their own administrative operations and in documents submitted by lawyers and litigants.

Thomas discussed the initiative following a meeting of the US Judicial Conference in Washington, Reuters reported. The conference serves as the federal judiciary’s principal policymaking body. According to Reuters, the judge said the task force is concentrating on ways AI can be used effectively while limiting potential risks.

The 24-member group, established in 2025, identified more than 60 areas requiring examination, Reuters reported. Its work covers subjects including cybersecurity, governance, ethics training, probation and pretrial operations, federal defender services and costs associated with deploying the technology. The group has produced about 30 recommendations so far.

Among the most significant concerns is whether judges could become overly dependent on generative AI when carrying out duties that require independent judicial judgment.

We’d love to be your preferred source for news.

Please add us to your preferred sources list so our news, data and interviews show up in your feed. Thanks!

Add as Preferred Source

Reuters reported that guidance distributed to federal judges in July 2025 advised them not to hand core judicial functions to AI systems and instructed them to independently check material produced by the technology. That guidance was not publicly released, but its contents were described in an October letter from the judiciary to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The letter followed incidents in which two judges acknowledged using AI while preparing court orders that subsequently contained mistakes, according to Reuters. Courts have also confronted fabricated case citations and other inaccurate material generated by AI in legal filings, sometimes resulting in sanctions against attorneys and people representing themselves.

At the same time, federal judges are exploring uses of AI that are more administrative than adjudicative.

Thomas pointed to the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, where 49% of appeals in the previous year involved people representing themselves, Reuters reported. Some of those litigants submit handwritten documents. AI has been used to convert such filings into more readable text, reducing work for court employees while making the submissions easier to review, according to Thomas’s comments reported by Reuters.

The 9th Circuit, along with the 5th and 6th US Circuit Courts of Appeals, has also deployed AI as a quality-control tool for the large volume of briefs received by the courts, Reuters reported. The systems can identify filings that fail to satisfy procedural or formatting requirements.

US Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who chairs the Judicial Conference’s executive committee, told reporters that such screening allows court clerks to alert litigants to defects and give them an opportunity to submit corrected documents rather than risk having an appeal dismissed for technical reasons, according to Reuters.

Source: Reuters