Air Canada held liable for chatbot's invented bereavement refund policy
Air Canada · Feb 14, 2024 · Customer service agent
What happened
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal ruled Air Canada must pay a customer C$650.88 in damages (C$812.02 with interest and fees) after its website chatbot fabricated a bereavement-fare refund policy. The tribunal held that companies are liable for statements made by their AI chatbots.
Causal vector
Customer-service chatbot hallucinated a non-existent refund policy that the company then refused to honor
Source
Reported by Ars Technica. Verified against the primary report.
A refund commitment is a financial transaction. Routing it through a firewall with a category rule (‘refunds > $0 require merchant on allowlist + documented policy version’) makes hallucinated promises unenforceable at the payment layer instead of litigable after the fact.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
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Don't be the next entry
Every incident in this database is the result of trusting a prompt, a provider cap, or a human review cycle. sipi.bot replaces all three with one deterministic call. 27 documented failures, one control.