Alaska's courts launch a probate chatbot after a "three-month project" took more than a year

March 2026 — Alaska's court system launched AVA, a free AI chatbot that explains probate to families after a death. Here's what launched, what it cost, and what went wrong on the way.

Cost and outcome (as of March 2, 2026)

Outcome: AVA launched March 2, 2026, answering probate questions from "court‑approved information" with links to the court's self-help pages. (Alaska Court System)
Cost: funded by a National Center for State Courts grant; the amount is not disclosed. (Alaska Court System)
Developer's claim: under one setup, 20 AVA queries would cost about 11 cents, LawDroid's Tom Martin said. (NBC News)
Status: free to use, available "24/7," probate only. (AVA FAQ)

What launched

AVA "guides customers through common questions about probate," the court's release says. That is the court process for dealing with a person's assets and debts after death. "Most people handle probate without an attorney," the release says.

Topics include types of probate cases, wills and trusts, the duties of personal representatives, options for distributing property without opening an estate, and court forms. AVA "does not provide legal advice."

The court's FAQ is blunt about limits. "AVA uses artificial intelligence (AI) to answer your questions and may make mistakes," it says. Each answer links to the pages it relied on, and users are told to "double check" them. AVA cannot review documents, predict outcomes or answer questions about other states. The court keeps transcripts of questions and answers and "may partner with outside organizations to audit the quality of AVA's answers and publish a report," the FAQ says.

"This tool represents an important step forward in making the justice system more accessible," said Stacey Marz, the court system's administrative director, in the release.

The build

AVA "was supposed to be a three-month project," Aubrie Souza, an NCSC consultant on it, told NBC News in January. "We are now at well over a year and three months."

"With a project like this, we need to be 100% accurate, and that's really difficult with this technology," Marz told NBC.

Hallucinations were a problem "regardless of the model," Souza said. Asked where to get legal help, the bot would say, "There's a law school in Alaska, and so look at the alumni network." Alaska has no law school, she said.

The team wrote 91 test questions. That proved too time-consuming to run and evaluate with human review, said Jeannie Sato, the court's director of access to justice services, so they settled on 16, NBC reported.

Early versions were also too sympathetic. "Through our user testing, everyone said, 'I'm tired of everybody in my life telling me that they're sorry for my loss,'" Souza said. The condolences came out.

A smaller goal

Marz had hoped AVA could replicate the court's human self-help facilitators. "We did shift our goals on this project a little bit," she told NBC. "But we're not confident that the bots can work in that fashion, because of the issues with some inaccuracies and some incompleteness."

"We anticipate needing to do regular checks and potentially update prompts or the models as new ones come out and others are retired," Martin said.

What went wrong

The schedule slipped. A three-month plan ran to "well over a year and three months" by January; NBC said launch was set for late January, and the release came March 2.
The bot invented facts. In testing, it pointed to a law school that doesn't exist, Souza said.
Testing shrank. The question set went from 91 to 16 because full review took too long, Sato said.
What we don't know yet: the grant amount, AVA's accuracy rate since launch, and whether the outside audit the FAQ mentions has happened.

Our follow-up question for the Alaska Court System

Since launch, how often has AVA given a wrong or incomplete answer, and will the audit report be published?

Sources

Alaska Court System, “Court System Launches New AI Chatbot to Help Alaskans Navigate Probate,” March 2, 2026. courts.alaska.gov
Alaska Court System, “AVA Faq.” courts.alaska.gov
NBC News, Jared Perlo, “Alaska's court system built an AI chatbot. It didn't go smoothly.,” Jan. 3, 2026. nbcnews.com

Disclosure: [not in copy] Editor placeholder