Jake Moffatt's grandmother died. He asked Air Canada's chatbot about bereavement fares, and it told him to book at full price and claim the discount back within ninety days. No such policy existed. The chatbot had produced the rule on its own. Air Canada refused to pay. In its written defence before the tribunal, the airline argued that the chatbot was a separate legal entity, responsible for its own actions.I work in industrial automation, where every automated action has a namedperson attached to the decision to let it run. That filing was the firsttime I'd seen a company argue the opposite in a courtroom.The tribunal ruled on it. What it decided — and what happened to a secondcompany that sent its own agents somewhere they weren't wanted — is in the video.
Posted by IceSea192
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Submission statement: In February 2024 the Civil Resolution Tribunal in British Columbia ruled on Moffatt v. Air Canada, a case about a chatbot that invented a refund policy. What makes it worth posting here is not the refund. It is the airline’s written defence, in which it argued that the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions. That is a company telling a court that the thing speaking on its behalf was somebody else. The ruling is now the reference point for who carries liability when an automated agent acts, and a second case that year went the opposite way for the person who sent the agent.