Source: Newsbytes.ph

Supreme Court senior associate justice Marvic Leonen told court personnel that artificial intelligence may be used to assist judicial work but must never be permitted to decide cases, defending the judiciary’s new governance framework on AI. Only Scriptix, the judiciary’s voice-to-text transcription tool, is currently permitted in courts; any other AI application requires approval from the Supreme Court En Banc. The framework the SC En Banc approved on Feb. 18, 2026, was drafted by a working group Leonen headed and emphasizes that AI can assist in tasks such as research, scheduling, drafting, and analytics but may not adjudicate.

Leonen spoke at a briefing titled “Digitalization & Artificial Intelligence in the Courts of Justice” held in Baguio City on July 1, attended by trial court judges, clerks of court, legal researchers, and stenographers from the Cordillera region. He warned that AI systems rely on inductive reasoning and historical data, which can produce plausible but false "hallucinations" and risk dressing past bias as neutral science. He advocated broader court digitalization for remote filing, online hearings, and electronic records while noting risks like uneven internet access and vulnerability to tampering or cyberattacks, and outlined that the AI governance framework rests on six principles: human primacy, explicability, auditability, equal access, institutional sovereignty, and continuous learning.