California SB 574: Will AI’s Home State Kill Off AI for Law?

SB 574 Won't Ban AI in California Law Practice — But It Makes "Delegation" the New Line Firms Have to Defend

SB 574 is a bill working through the California legislature, whose 2025-2026 session was set to close on August 31, 2026. As reported by Artificial Lawyer's Erin Fraser on August 26, 2026, the bill would amend the state's Business and Professions Code by adding §6068.1, covering attorneys and arbitrators who use "generative artificial intelligence." Most of it is uncontroversial: verify AI output, correct mistakes, keep sensitive data out of consumer-grade tools. One clause is not: attorneys "shall not delegate the practice of law" to generative AI — a phrase the bill never defines, in a state where courts have been arguing over what "practice of law" even means for more than 100 years.

What would SB 574 actually require lawyers to do?

Verify AI-generated accuracy, fix errors before filing, avoid feeding sensitive data into consumer tools, and never hand the practice of law itself to AI.

The specific duties sit in proposed §§6068.1(a)(3)(B)(i), (ii) and (a)(3)(A): check the work, correct it, and don't run privileged matters through consumer-grade chatbots. Reasonable enough, and arguably codifies what competent firms already do post-hallucination-scandal. The separate no-delegation clause, §6068.1(a)(2), is different in kind — it isn't a supervision duty, it's an outright ban on a category of conduct nobody has cleanly defined.

Why is "delegate the practice of law" the clause to actually watch?

Because California courts still can't agree what "practice of law" covers, and the bill borrows the term without pinning it down.

Artificial Lawyer traces the ambiguity back to People v. Merchants Protective Corp. in 1922, which approvingly quoted an 1893 case defining the practice of law to include legal advice, counsel, and preparing instruments that secure legal rights. Since then, California courts have found that clerical intake tools are fine, but software that generates "automated, customized suggestions" for completing court filings crosses the line. Template drafting, paralegal-prepared first drafts, AI-assisted client intake — all sit somewhere in between, and SB 574 doesn't say where.

Does this reach litigation-support and e-discovery tools, or just drafting bots?

The bill's language covers any generative AI an attorney uses, which puts document review and coding tools inside its scope too.

A platform that reads and issue-codes an entire collection, builds a cited chronology, and answers plain-language questions about the record isn't drafting a brief — but it is generating analysis a lawyer could act on without independently redoing the work. Under a literal reading of §6068.1(a)(2), that's exactly the grey zone the bill leaves open. Firms shouldn't assume "we're not using AI to write filings" gets them out of the delegation question.

What should buyers ask their vendor now, before this settles?

Ask what decision the tool makes unsupervised, and whether every output traces back to a verifiable source document.

Procurement should push vendors on two things: a documented human-review step before AI output becomes a work product, and outputs that cite back to the underlying exhibit so an attorney can verify rather than just trust. That second point — every answer linking to its source record — is less a feature and more a defensibility requirement if California or another state codifies a delegation standard this vague.

Frequently asked questions

Has SB 574 become law?

As of Artificial Lawyer's August 26, 2026 report, the bill was still alive with the legislative session due to close August 31, 2026; final passage wasn't confirmed at that point.

Does SB 574 only apply to litigators?

No. Proposed §6068.1 covers attorneys and arbitrators generally, so the delegation question applies to transactional and regulatory work as much as to disputes.

Has software ever been ruled "practice of law" in California before?

Yes — California case law has already found that software producing automated, customized suggestions for completing court filings crossed into practice of law, while purely clerical tools did not.

Source: "California SB 574: Will AI's Home State Kill Off AI for Law?", Artificial Lawyer, 26 August 2026.