India's Supreme Court extends consultation on draft AI-in-courts regulations amid a cautionary ruling

India's Supreme Court, through its Artificial Intelligence Committee, published draft "Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Courts, 2026" on June 3 and this week extended the public consultation period, continuing to solicit stakeholder feedback on a framework grounded in human primacy, transparency, accountability, and judicial independence (The Week). The draft explicitly requires AI systems to function only in an assistive capacity, prohibiting any supplanting of independent judicial authority, and a companion analysis published July 1 examines open liability questions in the framework (LiveLaw). The regulatory push gained urgency this week when the Supreme Court quashed a lower court verdict that had relied on AI-generated legal precedents, a episode local commentators dubbed the "Methyl Isocyanate of law" for its potential to contaminate case law with fabricated citations (The Hindu). Together, the draft rules and the quashed verdict illustrate the twin-track reality of judicial AI adoption: courts are simultaneously building formal governance infrastructure while also confronting real-world hallucination failures that validate the need for such guardrails. India's approach — assistive-only AI, mandatory human sign-off, and an open comment process — is likely to be referenced by other common-law jurisdictions drafting similar court-AI frameworks.