Résumé
In February 2024, a small-claims tribunal in British Columbia settled a question every company deploying an AI chatbot was quietly asking: who is responsible when the bot makes something up? Air Canada's support chatbot had told a grieving customer he could claim a bereavement discount retroactively, which was false and contradicted the airline's actual policy. When he tried to claim it, Air Canada refused and argued, remarkably, that the chatbot was a "separate legal entity" responsible for its own statements. The tribunal flatly rejected that and held the airline liable for what its bot said. The sum was tiny, about CAD 800, but the precedent was enormous: you own your AI's words.
How it happened
In November 2022, Jake Moffatt, who had just lost his grandmother, asked Air Canada's website chatbot about bereavement fares. The chatbot confidently stated that he could buy a full-price ticket and retroactively claim the bereavement discount within 90 days of travel. That contradicted Air Canada's real policy, which required the discount to be approved before flying, and the irony was that the chatbot's own answer even linked to the correct policy page. The chatbot had generated an ungrounded, fabricated policy answer with no enforced link to the airline's authoritative fare rules: untrusted model output presented to a customer as authoritative company information. Moffatt booked his flights relying on it, and when he later tried to claim the discount, Air Canada refused.
The ruling
Moffatt took the dispute to the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal (Moffatt v Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149). Air Canada's defence was striking: it argued the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own statements, a submission the tribunal member, Christopher Rivers, called "remarkable." He rejected it outright, ruling that the airline is responsible for all the information on its website, whether it comes from a static page or a chatbot, and that a customer has no way to know one part of a page is trustworthy and another is not. He found negligent misrepresentation and ordered Air Canada to pay CAD 812.02 (CA$650.88 in damages plus interest and tribunal fees). The money was trivial; the principle was a landmark: a company is accountable for the outputs of its AI agents.
Why Air Canada still matters
It is the AI-liability precedent. A hallucinating chatbot is not just an embarrassment, it can create binding obligations and real legal liability, because customers and courts treat it as the company speaking. The "the AI did it, not us" defence fails. The fix is architectural rather than legal: ground customer-facing AI answers in verified, retrieved policy data instead of free-form generation; constrain the bot to authoritative content and block unsupported claims; require human review for any statement that creates a financial or contractual obligation; and treat every chatbot output as the company's own word. It connects to the broader AI-reliability theme seen in the Replit agent that fabricated data and lied about its work.
Comment le corriger
- Honour commitments your AI has already made to customers (Air Canada was forced to), then fix the system so it cannot make ungrounded ones.
- Re-architect the bot to answer only from verified, retrieved policy content, and block free-form policy generation.
- Add human review or hard guardrails for any answer that creates a financial or contractual obligation.
Comment l’éviter
- Ground customer-facing answers in verified policy data instead of free-form model generation.
- Constrain the bot to retrieved authoritative content and block unsupported policy claims.
- Add human review or approval for statements that create financial or contractual obligations.
- Treat chatbot output as the company's own statements and validate before display.
- Monitor and log conversations to catch hallucinated commitments and policy errors.
Références
- https://www.canlii.org/en/bc/bccrt/doc/2024/2024bccrt149/2024bccrt149.html
- https://www.americanbar.org/groups/business_law/resources/business-law-today/2024-february/bc-tribunal-confirms-companies-remain-liable-information-provided-ai-chatbot/
- https://www.dentonsdata.com/airline-ordered-to-compensate-a-b-c-man-because-its-chatbot-provided-inaccurate-information/
- https://www.mccarthy.ca/en/insights/blogs/techlex/moffatt-v-air-canada-misrepresentation-ai-chatbot
Vulnérabilités liées
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- CRITICALAI-GROK-BANKR-WALLET-2026
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- HIGHAI-CLAUDECODE-SOURCEMAP-2026
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- MEDIUMAI-SECRETS-SPRAWL-2025
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- CRITICALAI-COPILOT-CAMOLEAK-2025
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- CRITICALAI-FORCEDLEAK-AGENTFORCE-2025
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