Risk register · entry
Q1 · PredictableAir Canada chatbot
A tribunal held an airline liable for a refund policy its chatbot invented.
Documented, foreseeable risks that were ignored anyway. The failure is attention, not information.
Why this room
The underlying mechanism was garden-variety negligent misrepresentation with one plaintiff and a capped, quantifiable loss, a simple linear payoff with a thin, bounded tail, so it stays in Q1 even though the delivery mechanism, an AI chatbot, sounded exotic enough that Air Canada tried to argue for a murkier category of liability.
The record
- C$812.02 total damages and fees ordered by the tribunalcertain
- C$650.88 of that total was the bereavement fare differencecertain
- C$36.14 pre-judgment interest and C$125 tribunal fees making up the restcertain
- Incident date: November 2022 (chatbot interaction and booking)certain
- Ruling date: 14 February 2024, BC Civil Resolution Tribunal, Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149certain
- Chatbot claimed a 90-day retroactive window to file for the bereavement discountcertain
- Air Canada initially offered a $200 CAD voucher before Moffatt filed the claimlikely
- Total round-trip ticket cost 'over $1,400 CAD' per CBS reportinguncertain
- Tribunal member: Christopher C. Riverscertain
- Armilla/Lloyd's AI hallucination insurance product launched 2025, citing Air Canada as a motivating caselikely
Sources
The book
This entry is one of 111 in the register. The full story, and what it cost the people who lived it, is in Risky Business by Claudia Zeisberger, David Munro and Joanna Reijgersberg-Siew.
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