Shifting Sands, A Cautionary Tale
On February 13, 2026, OpenAI retired GPT 4o from ChatGPT. That is a normal product change for a consumer platform. For courts, it is a useful reminder about what we are really doing when we build tools on top of foundation models.
Even when you design responsibly, narrow the scope, use approved sources, and test carefully before deployment, the system is still sitting on a layer you do not control. Whether it is a self help kiosk walking an unrepresented litigant through filing steps, a chambers assistant summarizing briefs and helping draft a bench memo, or a staff tool answering procedural questions for clerks, they all share the same dependency. They sit on top of a model layer the court does not control. That layer can change, and the surrounding behavior can change with it. The same input that produced a cautious answer last month can produce a materially different answer next month, even though you did not touch a line of code.
That is not a reason to avoid AI in courts. It is a reason to treat court AI as an operational program, not a one time build. Courts live on stability, predictability, and accountability. Those values do not disappear because a vendor shipped an update. If an assistant gives bad guidance, the public is not going to parse whether the cause was upstream or local. The responsibility will attach to the institution that deployed it.
So if a court is going to rely on an AI assistant for public facing information, internal staff work, or chambers support, the court needs ongoing control. It needs to know what model is in use and when it changes. It needs scheduled testing against real court questions, not just a launch day review.
Model changes need to be treated as meaningful changes, not routine maintenance. The court needs the ability to narrow features, pause the tool, or turn it off quickly when behavior shifts. And it needs a human owner for outputs whenever the stakes are real.
GPT 4o’s retirement from the spotlight is the cleanest proof of the point. You can spend months, or even years, building something correctly and still watch the foundation move without notice. Because that foundation will inevitably shift, the oversight mechanisms must match the stakes.
