Air Canada: the invented bereavement refund
The airline's chatbot told a grieving customer he could apply for a bereavement fare refund after flying. The real policy said the opposite. When he claimed it, staff contradicted the bot, and the dispute went to a tribunal. Air Canada argued the chatbot was a separate entity responsible for its own actions. The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal disagreed in words worth framing: the chatbot is still just a part of Air Canada's website. The airline was found liable for negligent misrepresentation and ordered to pay CA$812.02.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- Air Canada
- When
- November 2022Resolved February 14, 2024
- Failure class
- Silent wrong output silent-wrong-output
- Discovered by
- A customer customer Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- Grounded answers. Answers about policy, price, or law pulled from verified documents at answer time, never generated from the model's memory. Full definition and the other incidents in this group → Watch this kind of control catch a planted failure → A recorded run of a certificate gate refusing a bad document →
- What would have caught it
- Policy answers pulled from the published policy document at answer time, so the bot cannot state a refund rule the document does not contain.
- Sources
- Verification
- Confirmed: the claims held as first researched. The award was CA$650.88 in damages, CA$36.14 in interest and CA$125 in fees, CA$812.02 in total: the fare difference the chatbot had implied, not a refund of the ticket. Verified against the primary source on August 12, 2026. Published on this site August 13, 2026, updated September 1, 2026.
This record is one of 26 in The receipts, each checked against a primary source before it is published. How the list is built →