The Legal AI 'Force Majeure Creep' Problem: Why AI Contract Drafting Tools Are Expanding Boilerplate Clauses Into Substantive Risk Allocations Nobody Negotiated
Force majeure used to be boring. A clause nobody read closely, negotiated hard, or worried much about — until COVID-19 turned it into one of the most litigated provisions in commercial law history. Courts in Palm Springs Mile Associates v. Kirkland's Stores and hundreds of...
By Andy Armstrong | The Legal Stack | July 31, 2026
Force majeure used to be boring. A clause nobody read closely, negotiated hard, or worried much about — until COVID-19 turned it into one of the most litigated provisions in commercial law history. Courts in Palm Springs Mile Associates v. Kirkland's Stores and hundreds of similar disputes spent years parsing what "epidemic" and "government action" language actually allocated between parties. The lesson should have been: force majeure is not boilerplate. It is substantive risk allocation dressed in boilerplate clothing.
AI contract drafting tools didn't learn that lesson. They learned the opposite one.
What the Models Ingested and Why It Matters
The training corpus problem is straightforward once you see it. Post-2020 commercial contracts — renegotiated leases, amended supply agreements, revised SaaS terms — were full of expanded force majeure language. Parties scrambling during COVID added "pandemic," "epidemic," "public health emergency," "government-mandated closure," "supply chain disruption," and "labor shortage" to force majeure definitions as a matter of course. That language normalized. It proliferated. It got uploaded to contract management platforms, CLM systems, and the document repositories that large model training pipelines consumed.
The result: AI drafting tools now treat expansive, post-COVID force majeure language as the baseline. When you ask Ironclad, Harvey, or any number of comparable tools to generate a commercial supply agreement or SaaS master services agreement, the force majeure clause you get back reflects 2021 emergency renegotiation language, not the narrower pre-COVID standard that your client actually intended as the risk allocation starting point.
This is not a bug the vendors are advertising. It surfaces as a "reasonable" draft that looks like boilerplate but has quietly shifted which party bears the cost of disruption.
The Clause Patterns to Watch
Three specific expansions appear most frequently and most dangerously in AI-generated drafts right now.
Causation chain extensions. Traditional force majeure required that the covered event directly prevent performance. AI-generated clauses increasingly insert language excusing performance when an event "materially impacts" a party's ability to perform, or where performance becomes "commercially impracticable" due to a covered event affecting the party "or its suppliers or subcontractors." That last phrase is doing significant work. It allows a vendor two or three links down the supply chain to trigger force majeure relief at the contract level without the primary counterparty having any direct exposure to the triggering event. In Kel Kim Corp. v. Central Markets, New York courts held that force majeure requires genuine impossibility, not mere hardship. AI drafts are quietly moving the standard toward impracticability without flagging the shift.
Self-defining trigger lists. Pre-COVID force majeure clauses typically enumerated specific events — war, fire, flood, acts of God — followed by a narrow ejusdem generis catch-all. AI-generated clauses now routinely include "cybersecurity incidents," "critical infrastructure failures," "geopolitical instability," and "extraordinary market conditions" as enumerated events. These are not narrow, unforeseeable catastrophes. They are operational risks that sophisticated parties are expected to price and manage. When "extraordinary market conditions" appears as an excusing event in a fixed-price construction contract, you have fundamentally reallocated the contractor's pricing risk to the owner — and nobody at the deal table agreed to that.
Notice and cure asymmetries. AI-generated force majeure clauses increasingly default to extended cure periods — 90 or 120 days — before a non-affected party can terminate. Pre-COVID standard drafting frequently used 30-day windows. The extension sounds minor. In a construction project or a critical SaaS dependency, the difference between a 30-day and 120-day termination right can be the difference between a manageable delay and a project-killing dependency trap.
Where This Surfaces Most Dangerously
Supply chain agreements are ground zero. Multi-tier supply relationships are exactly where causation chain extensions become weaponized. A tier-one supplier invoking force majeure because a tier-three component supplier was affected by "geopolitical instability" is not a hypothetical — it is the pattern that the AI-generated language enables and that courts will be asked to parse.
SaaS and technology agreements carry particular risk around the cybersecurity incident carve-out. Vendors are using AI-drafted force majeure language to create contractual cover for downtime events that their SLAs would otherwise penalize. GCs negotiating enterprise software deals need to be explicit that force majeure does not override SLA credit structures. The AI draft will not make that distinction for you.
Construction contracts face the greatest exposure from the "extraordinary market conditions" trigger and extended notice periods. AIA contract forms have their own force majeure architecture. When a deal team uses an AI drafting tool to generate a bespoke construction agreement rather than working from AIA A201, the force majeure clause that comes back may systematically shift pricing and delay risk in ways that bear no relationship to what either party modeled in their bid or budget.
What Transactional Lawyers Should Be Auditing
First: treat every AI-generated force majeure clause as a first draft from a counterparty, not as neutral boilerplate. It is not neutral. The training data has a perspective.
Second: audit specifically for causation chain language. Delete "or its suppliers or subcontractors" unless your client is the vendor and that protection is intentional.
Third: check the trigger list against the deal's risk allocation logic. Every enumerated event should map to a risk the affected party cannot reasonably price or insure. "Extraordinary market conditions" fails that test in nearly every deal.
Fourth: reset notice and cure periods explicitly. Thirty days should be the default unless there is a deal-specific reason for extension.
Fifth: in SaaS and technology deals, add an explicit carve-out confirming that force majeure does not affect SLA credit obligations. AI tools will not generate this protection automatically.
The Bottom Line
Force majeure was never boilerplate. COVID made that obvious. AI drafting tools have now made it structurally dangerous again — not through dramatic overreach, but through the mundane accumulation of trained-in language that quietly reallocates risk in every draft. The clause looks familiar. The risk profile is not. Deal lawyers who treat force majeure as the last paragraph to review are the ones who will be explaining to clients why their fixed-price contract or their critical vendor SLA has a 120-day excuse window nobody negotiated. Read the clause. Then read it again.
Andy Armstrong covers legal technology and transactional practice for The Legal Stack.