New USGA tool uses AI to settle your golf rules debates

Golfers have always had rules questions, but the problem is that golfers have them in convenient places.

Your ball moves after a squirrel investigates it. You take relief from a cart path and suddenly wonder if you dropped on the wrong side. Your buddy says you get free relief from where your ball comes to rest, but you’re not sure he’s right.

When things like that happen, invariably, someone from the tournament’s committee is on the other side of the course, the club pro is back in the shop, and if you Google your question, you see answers from a dozen different sources who may (or may not) know what they are talking about.

That is the space the United States Golf Association is trying to fill with Rules AI, a new artificial intelligence tool being introduced inside the GHIN mobile app. Developed with Deloitte, Rules AI is designed to give golfers fast, accurate answers to Rules of Golf questions using their phones. The USGA announced the pilot phase of the tool on Wednesday, with a phased rollout already underway at select clubs and a target of making it available to all GHIN users in spring 2027.  

The idea started, fittingly, with ChatGPT.

Craig Winter, the USGA’s director of Rules of Golf and amateur status, said the concept began the day ChatGPT became publicly available. After he and some friends started asking ChatGPT some rules questions about things like basic cart path relief, he was surprised by how well the system answered the questions. He also saw that some confidently answered questions delivered wrong information. That got Winter thinking: Could the USGA build something better using its own Rules expertise?

The answer became a two-year project built around one non-negotiable idea. Accuracy had to come first.

Rules AI is not just a generic chatbot dressed in a golf shirt. According to the USGA, it has been trained on official Rules content, decisions and more than 25,000 real questions previously submitted by real golfers and answered by USGA Rules experts. Those questions are important because they reflect how golfers actually ask about the Rules, which is rarely as cleanly as the rule book presents them.

To manage the complexity of golf’s Rules, the USGA has broken its database into roughly 500 topics. When a golfer asks a question, the system first determines whether it is actually a Rules question. If it is, the question gets routed toward the most relevant topic. Multiple AI agents then generate answers based on approved USGA data, and another system compares those answers for consistency before a response is delivered.

The tool also has guardrails.

“The most important part of this was to be comfortable that we were able to create a system that would know when it didn't know the right answer,” Winter said. “(We needed to know) it wasn't going to provide the hallucinations that you often see, and, frankly, incorrect answers that it was very confident in producing.”

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That’s important because one of the biggest problems with general AI systems is that they can provide incorrect information with what appears to be extraordinary confidence. If Rules AI can’t provide an answer with enough confidence, it will direct golfers to contact the USGA Rules team instead.

The current version of Rules AI is intentionally simple. A golfer opens the GHIN app, taps the Rules AI icon and types a question. The system gives a single answer, not an extended back-and-forth conversation.

In one demonstration, a question about a ball moved by an animal produced the correct answer: no penalty, replace the ball on its original spot, estimating that spot if necessary. When the question was changed to say the player failed to replace the ball and played on, the answer shifted to the penalty for playing from the wrong place.

It’s a smart philosophy because most golfers do not need a philosophical lecture on Rule 9. They just want to know what to do before hitting the next shot.

The USGA is careful to say this is not meant to replace a committee or put a tournament referee in every golfer’s pocket. In competition, the committee still has authority. But for recreational golfers, club professionals, high school players and tournament volunteers, the ability to get a USGA-backed answer quickly could prevent bad information from spreading through a foursome and mistakes from being made.

The rollout will be gradual. Rules AI is already available to a limited number of GHIN users at select clubs, with plans to get access in the coming months. The USGA plans to scale access throughout 2026 before a broader GHIN rollout in spring 2027.

Long-term, the USGA sees greater possibilities. Future versions could include conversational follow-up questions, Rules videos, diagrams and possibly image-based assistance, where a golfer could show the system a ball’s position and get help describing the situation.

For now, though, the goal is more straightforward: give golfers reliable Rules answers where they already are.

Rules AI will not eliminate every gray area or stop someone in your group from confidently giving the wrong ruling. But if it works the way the USGA hopes, golfers will have something better than a guess or a search engine.

They will have an accurate Rules answer from the people who actually write the Rules.

David Dusek is a senior writer for Golfweek, focusing on equipment and technology.

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: USGA launches Rules AI to give golfers fast accurate rules answers