Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Friday emphasized that while artificial intelligence tools are transforming the exercise of sovereign and judicial powers, the international community must urgently develop a legal framework to address the concerning downsides of AI-driven activities. These activities, when conducted in one country, can have significant territorial consequences for another, he warned.
AI Reshaping Governance and Sovereignty
Delivering a public lecture at the University of London, CJI Kant stated that AI is now an operational reality reshaping governance, commerce, warfare, communication, public administration, and increasingly, the exercise of judicial and sovereign power itself. He highlighted that the jurisdictional limitations in regulating AI-driven activities pose a serious challenge.
International Law Must Adapt
The CJI noted that international law must increasingly confront 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 remarked, "If jurisdiction determines where power operates, liability determines who must answer for its consequences. Artificial Intelligence destabilises both simultaneously."
AI systems frequently operate through distributed chains involving developers, data suppliers, deployers, cloud infrastructure providers, private corporations, and sovereign actors spread across multiple jurisdictions, creating an accountability vacuum. The CJI posed critical questions: "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?"
Autonomous Weapons and Military AI
The significance of this issue heightens in the context of autonomous weapon systems and military applications of AI, which complicate the attribution of intent and decision-making. The current legal system struggles to fasten liability on the persons who implemented the systems and those who took the decisions. Even developers of AI-based implements are unable to explain why their machines performed certain actions on some occasions, making the task of attributing accountability and providing remedy through a legal framework extremely difficult.
Preserving Legal Responsibility
CJI Kant stated, "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."
He extended this concern beyond warfare, noting that 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 added.
AI Bias and Democratic Accountability
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." He called for urgent global cooperation to address these challenges.
