Retiring UK judge says courts must decide where AI belongs

Geoffrey Vos, England’s retiring Master of the Rolls, says courts should consider lessons from Shenzhen, where he saw judges using AI heavily in civil disputes. His interview also puts a live question to the UK: who decides whether a machine may rule on a case, and on what terms?

Watch Desk analysis

What happened

Resultsense reports that Vos told WIRED he uses Microsoft Copilot to find old documents and summarise material, but not to write judgments. He says county court claims are growing by around 10% a year and may rise faster because people are using chatbots to prepare cases. He acknowledges there is no data showing how many of those claims are sound, and argues that AI-assisted claims should not automatically be dismissed as frivolous.

Vos has previously suggested that AI might one day decide low-value civil cases, while leaving family, custody and complex commercial disputes to human judges. In this interview, he says people should either consent to machine decisions in their own cases or society should settle the question through legislation. Resultsense says current English judicial guidance limits judges’ AI use to administrative work.

Why it matters

The prospect is not simply faster paperwork. If AI starts helping decide disputes, the rules would shape who gets a human decision-maker, how a decision is explained and whether the parties had a meaningful choice. Vos’s account of rising claims is a reason to examine the pressure on courts, not proof that chatbots are causing the increase: he says the figures are not available.

Our read

Vos is right to make consent and public rules part of the conversation. A court system should not drift from summarising documents to deciding people’s cases by quietly extending the software’s job description. Faster decisions may help with backlogs, but speed is a poor substitute for understanding why a judge ruled against you.

What to watch

• Whether Vos’s successor supports a wider role for AI in civil courts.
• Whether the judiciary or lawmakers propose rules for AI-assisted decisions.
• What evidence emerges about chatbot-assisted claims and court workloads.
• How any trial would explain decisions and let parties challenge them.

Discussion spark: Should people be allowed to choose an AI decision-maker for a low-value civil case, or must a human judge remain available in every case?

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