Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito jokes about letting Claude AI decide a major case

• Anthropic's Claude AI came up during oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Monday.
• Justice Samuel Alito asked whether the court should use Claude to decide the case before them.
• The lawyer arguing that case is a proponent of using AI in the legal field.

Even Supreme Court justices are talking about Claude.

Associate Justice Samuel Alito, one of the court's conservative members, brought up the Anthropic-owned large language model in a humorous way during oral arguments at the court on Monday.

"Well, just out of curiosity, do you think we should ask Claude to decide this case?" Alito asked, spurring laughter.

The petitioner's counsel, Adam Unikowsky, replied that he would instead "adhere to the wise judgment of" the court.

Claude had little to do with the underlying case, Jules v. Andre Balazs Properties, which is related to the ability of federal courts to confirm arbitration awards.

So why did Alito bring it up?

Unikowsky, a lawyer at Jenner & Block who's argued more than a dozen cases before the Supreme Court, happens to be an AI enthusiast who's experimented with using the technology in legal practice.

He has written several newsletter posts about experimenting with AI in the law, and has argued as far back as June 2024 that AI "can accurately decide cases and write judicial opinions."

In one instance, Unikowsky gave Claude the briefs for several Supreme Court cases, finding that the large language model "consistently decides cases correctly" and that when it differs from how the Supreme Court actually decided the case, its "disposition is invariably reasonable."

Last year, Unikowsky even experimented with allowing Claude to present an oral argument before a court, concluding that courts "should permit robot lawyers at oral arguments and shouldn't discourage this practice."