BETWEEN INNOVATION AND ILLEGALITY: A CRITICAL STUDY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CRIMES AND THE LIMITS OF INDIA’S EXISTING PENAL AND REGULATORY REGIME

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has fundamentally transformed the nature of crime, governance, and legal accountability. While AI-driven innovation offers significant economic and administrative benefits, it simultaneously enables novel forms of criminal conduct that strain the conceptual foundations of contemporary criminal law. This research examines the phenomenon of AI-enabled crimes in India and evaluates the capacity of the country’s reformed criminal justice framework, particularly the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS), the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000, and allied regulatory instruments, to address such emerging harms. It argues that despite the replacement of the colonial-era Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860 with the BNS, India’s penal framework continues to rely on anthropocentric assumptions of intent, causation, and agency, rendering it ill-suited to crimes characterized by algorithmic autonomy, opacity, scalability, and distributed responsibility. The research delves into core criminal law doctrines, such as mens rea, attribution of liability, evidentiary standards, and corporate culpability in the context of AI-mediated conduct, exposing persistent doctrinal and enforcement gaps. It further critiques India’s fragmented and predominantly soft-law approach to AI governance, marked by sector-specific guidelines and ethical frameworks lacking binding force, and situates this within a comparative analysis of emerging international regulatory models. The research contends that the absence of a comprehensive statutory framework for AI accountability risks regulatory paralysis, either by under-criminalizing serious algorithmic harms or by adopting overbroad penal responses that may stifle innovation. It concludes by advocating a recalibrated, risk-sensitive, and anticipatory legal framework capable of harmonizing technological progress with the imperatives of legality, accountability, and constitutional governance.