After his grandmother died in November 2022, Jake Moffatt used a support chatbot on Air Canada’s website to ask about bereavement fares. The chatbot told him he could buy a ticket at the regular price and apply for the bereavement rate retroactively within 90 days. That was wrong - Air Canada’s actual policy did not allow retroactive bereavement claims - and when Moffatt later requested the difference, the airline refused. He brought the dispute to British Columbia’s Civil Resolution Tribunal.
In a decision dated February 14, 2024 (Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149), Tribunal Member Christopher C. Rivers found the airline liable for negligent misrepresentation. Air Canada had argued it could not be held responsible for information provided by its chatbot. The tribunal was unimpressed: “In effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions. This is a remarkable submission. While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website. It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot.”
The tribunal found Air Canada “did not take reasonable care to ensure its chatbot was accurate” and awarded Moffatt $650.88 in damages, rejecting the airline’s claim to a set-off. The ruling became an early, widely cited statement that a business owns what its AI tools tell customers.
The one-line lesson: deploying a chatbot does not outsource your liability - if your AI tells a customer something untrue, the company answers for it just as if it had been printed on the website.