Legal AI that must show its receipts.

Part I — The duty

The rules arrived before the instruments

In March 2026 the High Court at Milimani struck out an application assembled by a generative AI tool, citing cases that do not exist. Two months later the Judiciary circulated a draft AI Policy with Practice Directions: an advocate who relies on AI-assisted research must independently verify every authority cited, and disclose the use of AI on filing.

The obligation is right. But it is discharged by hand, and it produces no evidence. The advocate who checked every authority and the advocate who checked nothing file the same certificate — nothing distinguishes them until something goes wrong in open court.

Hallucinated authority is not a defect better models will cure. A language model holds an impression of what citations look like, not a citation index. The remedy is architectural: bind the assistant to an authoritative retrieval source, and make the binding provable.

Part II — The counter

A registry counter any AI can walk up to

Nukuu is deliberately not a legal AI product. It is plumbing: a machine-readable counter at the registry of Kenyan law, speaking the Model Context Protocol — the open, vendor-neutral standard by which AI assistants call external tools. Nothing has to be abandoned; it improves whatever assistant a firm, a court or a citizen already uses.

Every answer carries the source URI it was retrieved from — attribution to the official record by construction, and point-in-time answers follow the record's own expression dates. A citation the corpus cannot answer for is said so honestly: not in corpus is not fabricated, and the distinction is kept.

Part III — The receipt

Compliance as a by-product of working

Every session ends in a receipt: a compact, signed, timestamped record of which authorities were retrieved and which resolved. The unresolved citation surfaces at the desk — not in open court. A bench or opposing counsel checks the receipt against the issuer's published key in seconds, without re-running the research.

Anyone can run the check — no AI required: paste a receipt at nukuu.ti20.io/verify and get yes or no on any phone. That is the entire cost of verification for a bench, a registry, or opposing counsel.

It cannot be composed after the fact. In rehearsal we forged one carefully — status upgraded, notes cleaned, summary rewritten, internally perfect to any reader. It still failed verification, because the signature is computed over the bytes, and the bytes changed. An advocate cannot quietly upgrade a failed citation check.

And it claims no more than it proves: retrieval and resolution. Whether the authority was read, and whether it supports the proposition — those remain professional judgment, and the receipt says so on its face.

Part IV — The protocol

How your assistant and the counter talk

When an AI assistant answers from memory, it is a junior reciting what they recall of the law — fluent, fast, and unaccountable. What Nukuu changes is that the junior now walks to the registry: whenever the answer should rest on an authority, the assistant sends a request to the counter and works from what the counter returns.

The language they speak is the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an open standard for exactly this exchange. The best analogy is the prescribed forms of court practice: because the forms are uniform, any advocate can file at any registry. MCP is the prescribed form for AI assistants — any assistant, from any vendor, can present a request at any counter that speaks the protocol. No integration project, no proprietary portal, no lock-in.

Three things matter in that exchange. The request is defined — a form, not a conversation — so the counter answers with data, not prose, and the assistant cannot half-remember it. The request carries only the citation — your client, your facts and your strategy never leave your side of the exchange. And each call happens with your approval — the assistant asks before it uses a tool, so you see every trip to the counter.

Part V — How to use it

Connect it in two minutes

Nukuu is not an app you download. It is a connector you add once to the AI assistant you already use — on your phone or your laptop — and from then on that assistant can check every citation against the record. No account, no key, nothing to install.

claude mcp add --transport http \
  nukuu https://nukuu.ti20.io/mcp

{ "mcpServers": {
    "nukuu": { "type": "http", "url": "https://nukuu.ti20.io/mcp" } } }

Part VI — In practice

A morning in a Kenyan practice

Part VII — The record

Sources, copyright, and whose corpus this is

• Kenyan primary law belongs with its custodian, the National Council for Law Reporting (Kenya Law). Every Nukuu answer points back at the official record it was retrieved from.
• The demonstrator's corpus is six statutes, hand-collected from the official publication platform — text and structure only, which carry no copyright. Kenya Law's PDF copies are licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and are not redistributed here.
• Kenya maintains its legislation in Akoma Ntoso, the OASIS standard for legal documents — through the Indigo platform, with Laws.Africa and AfricanLII. That structured corpus is why this layer can exist at all.
• Nothing is scraped, and nothing beyond public access is claimed. Any version of Nukuu past this demonstrator begins with a licensing conversation with Kenya Law — that constraint is the first gate, not a detail for later.
• Confidentiality is architectural: Nukuu receives a citation, a subject, a date. The matter — client, facts, theory of the case — never crosses the boundary.

Part VIII — Limits

What this is not