CJI Surya Kant (Source: ANI)

New Delhi: CJI Surya Kant on Friday said that although Artificial Intelligence tools are reshaping the exercise of sovereign and judicial powers, the international community must quickly put in place a legal framework to deal with the worrying aspect of AI-driven activities, which if carried out by one country can lead to significant regional consequences for another.Delivering a public lecture at the University of London, CJI Kant said AI is an operational reality that is reshaping governance, commerce, warfare, communications, public administration and increasingly the exercise of judicial and sovereign power.Outlining the limits of jurisdiction to regulate AI-driven activities, the CJI said international law must increasingly strive to confront such forms of AI-molded powers “that are no longer neatly contained within geography, yet continue to generate deep regional consequences for individuals and societies”.He said, “If jurisdiction determines where power operates, liability determines who must answer for its consequences. Artificial Intelligence destabilizes both simultaneously.”However, AI systems often operate through distributed chains involving developers, data suppliers, employers, cloud infrastructure providers, private corporations and sovereign actors spanning multiple jurisdictions, thus creating an accountability void, he said.The CJI asked – “When an autonomous system causes harm, who bears the responsibility? Is the liability attributable to the developer who designed the architecture? The entity that deployed the system? The sovereign government that authorized its use? Or the entity that supplied the underlying data on which the algorithm was trained?”He said the importance of this issue increases in the context of military application of autonomous weapons systems and AI, which complicates the intent and decision-making process as the current legal system focuses on imposing it on those who implement it and those who make the decisions.Even developers of AI-based tools are unable to explain why their machines did certain things on certain occasions, making the task of determining accountability and providing remedies through a legal framework difficult, he said.CJI Kant said, “The challenge before the international community is not just to regulate technological capability, but to preserve legal responsibility in an environment where decision making is increasingly mediated through algorithmic systems. If responsibility becomes too fragmented to recognize, accountability itself risks becoming illusory.“And this threat extends beyond war. Financial markets, health care systems, transportation networks, and critical public infrastructure are increasingly dependent on automated systems capable of producing results at scale. The greater the autonomy of technological systems, the greater the need for strong legal frameworks capable of ensuring meaningful human oversight,” he said.Warning that AI could be as biased as humans, the CJI said, “AI systems can systematically produce discriminatory results while maintaining the appearance of mathematical objectivity… The result is a kind of ambiguity that may prove deeply corrosive to democratic accountability.”