AI reshaping exercise of judicial and sovereign powers: CJI

NEW DELHI: CJI Surya Kant on Friday said though Artificial Intelligence tools are reshaping exercise of sovereign and judicial powers, the international community must quickly devise a legal framework to deal with a concerning flipside of AI-driven activities, which when carried out it one country, can cause significant territorial consequences for another.

Delivering a public lecture at University of London, CJI Kant said AI is an operational reality that is reshaping governance, commerce, warfare, communication, public administration, and increasingly, the exercise of judicial and sovereign power itself.

Flagging the jurisdictional limitations to regulate AI driven activities, the CJI said International Law must increasingly attempt to confront such forms of AI-moulded powers “that are no longer neatly contained within geography yet continue to produce deeply territorial consequences for individuals and societies”.
He said, “If jurisdiction determines where power operates, liability determines who must answer for its consequences. Artificial Intelligence destabilises both simultaneously.”

AI systems, however, frequently operate through distributed chains involving developers, data suppliers, deployers, cloud infrastructure providers, private corporations, and sovereign actors spread across multiple jurisdictions, thus creating an accountability vacuum, he said.

The CJI asked – “When an autonomous system causes harm, who bears responsibility? Is liability attributable to the developer who designed the architecture? The entity that deployed the system? The sovereign government that authorised its use? Or the institution that supplied the underlying data upon which the algorithm was trained?”

He said the significance of the issue heightens in the context of autonomous weapon systems and military application of AI, which complicate the attribution of intent and decision-making as the present legal system is on fastening it on the persons who implemented and those who took the decision.

As even the developers of AI-based implements are unable to explain why their machines did certain things on some occasions, the task of attributing accountability and providing remedy through a legal framework becomes difficult, he said.

CJI Kant said, “The challenge before the international community is therefore not merely to regulate technological capability, but to preserve legal responsibility in environments where decision-making is increasingly mediated through algorithmic systems. If responsibility becomes too fragmented to identify, accountability itself risks becoming illusory.”

“And that danger extends beyond warfare. Financial markets, healthcare systems, transportation networks, and critical public infrastructure are increasingly dependent upon automated systems capable of producing large scale consequences. The greater the autonomy of technological systems, the greater the need for robust legal frameworks capable of ensuring meaningful human oversight,” he said.

Warning that AI could be as biased as humans, the CJI said, “AI systems can produce systematically discriminatory outcomes while maintaining the appearance of mathematical objectivity… The result is a form of opacity that may prove deeply corrosive to democratic accountability.”