Barrett Says Supreme Court Avoiding AI Over Security Concerns

Even as the legal industry increasingly adopts AI tools, Justice Amy Coney Barrett says the Supreme Court isn’t embracing the technology.

“The court is not using AI because it would be insecure,” Barrett said Saturday while speaking at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. “So you can trust that our opinions are not AI-generated.”

The justices have repeatedly faced questions during public appearances about how AI is changing practice before the court. During an appearance last year, Barrett said she had it on “good authority” that lawyers were using AI tools to predict questions they’d face from the justices.

Barrett’s AI comment came days after Milbank partner Neal Katyal revealed he used a Harvey AI model trained on 25 years of Supreme Court papers to prepare for oral arguments in the court’s tariffs case. Katyal said the AI predicted “almost verbatim” what questions the justices would ask, and even what their opinions would look like.

Last month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor told a room full of students at the University of Alabama School of Law that AI should be viewed as a “sophisticated human”—with all of the potential and biases that comes with it. She, too, mused about advocates using AI to try to predict the justices’ work.

“I’m told by a colleague that there is a computer system that predicts our Supreme Court decisions and that it’s touting a very high prediction rate,” Sotomayor said. “I told him I thought that was a very bad thing, because it shows we’re way too predictable.”