Courtready co-founder Tom Macintosh Zheng spoke with Global News about the rising use of artificial intelligence in Canadian courtrooms, and what our research shows about who is using it.

On September 19, 2026, Global News broadcast a segment on the rising use of artificial intelligence in Canadian courtrooms. Reporter Toni De Guzman spoke with Courtready co-founder Tom Macintosh Zheng about the findings in our research database, and with Dr. Katie Szilagyi, Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Law.

Our Canadian AI Hallucination Cases Database now records 254 decisions across 62 courts and tribunals in which an adjudicator identified fictitious citations or another form of AI misuse. In 83 per cent of them, the person who filed the material did not have a lawyer.

That last figure is why we treat this as an access to justice issue. Most people turning to these tools are doing so in good faith, because they cannot afford counsel. The issue, in our view, is not that people are using AI. It is that many of them do not know that AI has a tendency to mislead. We tested six generative AI models ourselves on whether they can tell real law from fake. The results are here.