ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LAW

Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) is increasingly becoming embedded in activities that were traditionally governed by direct human judgment. Automated systems now assist in recruitment, credit assessment, healthcare, education, content generation, surveillance and public administration. The legal significance of this development lies not merely in the sophistication of the technology but in the possibility that consequential decisions may be produced through systems whose operation is difficult for affected individuals to understand or challenge. This creates questions concerning privacy, equality, discrimination, intellectual property, liability, procedural fairness and the allocation of responsibility among developers, deployers and users. India presently addresses these concerns through a combination of constitutional principles, information-technology legislation, data-protection law, sectoral regulation and policy initiatives rather than through a comprehensive AI statute. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, together with the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025, has strengthened India's data-governance architecture, but data protection alone cannot resolve the wider accountability problems created by AI. This article examines the principal legal challenges associated with AI and compares India's developing approach with the European Union's risk-based Artificial Intelligence Act and the United States' standards-oriented approach. It argues that India's future AI governance should preserve a legally traceable chain of responsibility whenever decision-making is delegated to automated systems. Such a framework should combine risk classification, meaningful human oversight, transparency, privacy safeguards, anti-discrimination measures, lifecycle accountability and effective remedies. The objective should not be to prevent technological development, but to ensure that automation does not become a means of diluting legal responsibility.