AIBRIEF
Arizona Supreme Court rejected a petition seeking a moratorium on judicial AI use, saying the only way to study the technology is to run it inside the courts.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a Rule 28 petition that asked the court to bar judges from using generative AI until the technology could be studied further (KJZZ).
The petition, identified as R-26-0020 in the court's order, would have imposed a moratorium on any judicial AI use. The court declined in a brief one-paragraph order, telling the petitioner that the only way to study the technology is for courts to run it themselves (R-26-0020 PDF).
Under the policy left in place, judges and court staff may use approved generative-AI tools for back-office work such as drafting correspondence, summarizing documents, and meeting notes, but they remain barred from using AI to make any legal ruling or decision. The approved-tools registry maintained by the court's Forensic Science Center currently lists products including Copilot-Basic, Claude-Chat, ChatGPT-Chat, Gemini, Perplexity, and Adobe AI for general use, and WestLaw Precision and Lexis+ AI for legal research (Arizona Courts AI registry).
Arizona was already the first state to add a technology-competence requirement to its Code of Judicial Conduct, via Supreme Court Order R-24-0052, which amended Rule 2.5 and took effect January 1, 2026 (Esquire Solutions analysis).
A judicial AI steering committee advising the court plans to issue a related report next year, leaving the study-by-using posture a live policy choice rather than a settled one.