Can AI Serve as an Assistant Judge? Alibaba’s One‑Second Verdict Breakthrough

AI in vertical domains is no longer primitive. Alibaba’s DAMO Academy announced a breakthrough where AI reaches assistant‑judge level, capable of delivering a verdict in a second.

The research was published at the top information‑retrieval conference SIGIR, where organizers highlighted it as a pioneering achievement in judicial intelligence.

In 2018, Hangzhou’s West Lake District Court demonstrated a “one‑person courtroom” with remote participants and a robot clerk, sparking imagination about intelligent justice. Alibaba’s latest work moves beyond the 1.0 digital‑court stage to a 2.0 era where AI actively participates in litigation.

Powered by deep learning and transfer learning, the AI analyzed tens of thousands of transaction‑dispute cases, learned nearly a thousand legal provisions, and built a computable model for each case type. It automatically provides relevant statutes and creates a comprehensive judicial knowledge graph that captures the relationships among parties, transactions, and legal facts.

When a judge encounters a similar dispute, the AI can instantly analyze the key issues and offer mediation and judgment recommendations, reducing the traditional two‑hour case‑review process to roughly one second.

Currently, this technology is applied to online transaction dispute cases in the Hangzhou Internet Court, where such disputes account for about 20% of the court’s workload. The system dramatically cuts repetitive labor, boosting judicial efficiency.