What is happening in federal courts is less a coordinated rulemaking and more an accretion of binding local orders that are collectively setting the standard before Congress has weighed in. The tripling of AI disclosure requirements since 2024 did not follow from a single decision or a legislative directive — it followed from individual judges responding to a specific failure mode, hallucinated citations, and then generalizing the fix into standing orders that attach to every case in their docket. The result is a patchwork that functions as a national standard…