AI Incident Intelligence

Air Canada held liable for inaccurate chatbot fare guidance

A Canadian tribunal found Air Canada liable after a customer relied on incorrect chatbot guidance about retroactive bereavement fares.

mediumAir CanadahallucinationCanada

Impact

The tribunal ordered damages, interest and fees; the case became a widely cited example of organisational responsibility for customer-facing AI information.

Contributing factors

Inconsistent information between the chatbot and the airline's published policy, with insufficient control over authoritative customer guidance.

Response

Tribunal remedy to the customer; organisations have since cited the case as a governance lesson for AI-enabled customer advice.

Assurance lesson

This record should inform control design, testing and monitoring for comparable AI systems. The incident database does not infer that every system using the same provider or model shares the same failure.

Control lessons

Assurance controls implicated by this incident pattern.

These are CRG methodology mappings from the documented incident to controls worth testing in comparable systems. They do not assert that any single control would have prevented the incident.

GOV-01

Named AI accountability

Each material AI system has named business, technical and risk accountability.

REL-02

Failure-mode testing

Known failure modes including hallucination and instruction failure are explicitly tested.

TRC-05

Limitations communication

Known limitations and out-of-scope uses are communicated to operators and users.

MON-01

Production monitoring

Material performance, safety, security and cost signals are monitored after release.

Evidence

Source provenance is part of the incident record.

British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal / public decision record · confidence 92% · last verified 23 Aug 2026

Open underlying source