140+ Federal Judges Have Issued AI Filing Orders — Four Distinct Regulatory Categories Emerging

The Legal Stack's Legal AI Judicial Response Report 2026, published July 10, documents that as of June 2026, more than 140 federal district judges and multiple circuit courts have issued standing orders or local rules governing AI-assisted filings, while state courts present a fragmented picture from comprehensive AI rules to complete silence. The report identifies four regulatory categories: Category 1 (≈61 orders) — disclosure plus attorney certification that citations were independently verified; Category 2 (≈49 orders) — citation certification only, beyond standard Rule 11; Category 3 (≈18 orders) — outright prohibition pending further order, concentrated in D. Kansas and E.D. Louisiana; Category 4 (≈15 orders, the newest development) — tool-specific disclosure requiring the name, version, and provider of every AI tool used in the filing. For litigators and legal ops teams managing multi-district litigation, the taxonomy is a compliance architecture problem: a single brief filed across multiple districts may trigger four different disclosure obligations. Category 4's tool-specific requirement is the most consequential emerging standard — it converts AI governance from a policy declaration into an auditable technical record.