All vulnerabilities
MEDIUMAI/LLM

AI-AIRCANADA-CHATBOT-2024

Air Canada · Air Canada website support chatbot

Summary

On February 14, 2024 the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal decided Moffatt v Air Canada (2024 BCCRT 149), holding the airline liable for wrong information its website support chatbot gave a customer. In November 2022 Jake Moffatt asked the chatbot about bereavement fares and it stated he could buy a full-price ticket and retroactively claim the bereavement discount within 90 days of travel, which contradicted Air Canada's real policy that the discount must be approved before flying. The failure was the bot generating an ungrounded, fabricated policy answer with no enforced link to the airline's authoritative fare rules, so untrusted model output was presented to a customer as authoritative company information. Air Canada argued the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own statements; the tribunal rejected this, ruling the airline is responsible for all information on its site whether from a static page or a chatbot, and found negligent misrepresentation. It ordered Air Canada to pay CAD 812.02, a landmark on companies being accountable for their AI agents' outputs.

How to avoid it in your code

  • 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.

References

Related vulnerabilities

All AI/LLM →