# Aradia and the Air Canada Ruling — You Answer For What Your Bot Says

**Quick Facts.** Moffatt v. Air Canada (B.C. Civil Resolution Tribunal, Feb. 2024): the airline was liable for a hallucinated bereavement refund its chatbot invented. Company responsibility attaches to every automated promise.

`>` Consumer / Court Ruling / 2024-02-15 · INC-2024-001 — https://aradia.com/briefs/chatbot-liability/

When a grieving traveler asked Air Canada’s chatbot (Wired, Feb. 15, 2024) about bereavement fares, it hallucinated a retroactive-refund policy that did not exist. Air Canada argued the chatbot was a "separate information source" acting independently. The tribunal rejected the defense: the airline was responsible for every promise its chatbot made.

# WHAT THE RULING ACTUALLY ESTABLISHED

One hallucination. One precedent: you own what your agents say.

// The model did it failed
A company cannot disclaim output from a product it deployed. The tribunal held that reasonable travelers read the chatbot as the airline speaking — the interface is the company. Vendor distance is not a legal defense.

// Liability follows the interface
Whatever surface you give customers — chat, agent, voice line — the promises on it are terms you did not negotiate but are bound by. Hallucinated terms become ordered terms.

// Black-box vendors do not inherit your liability
If the model is hosted somewhere on the internet, version unknown, changed silently, the answers your company stands behind came from a moving target you cannot audit, cite, or freeze. That is a compliance problem with a plaintiff attached.

> Source: [Wired, Feb. 15, 2024](https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy/).

# The Remedy Is Physical, Not Policy

Frozen models on owned metal: the only answers you can defend in court.

// The cloud-AI exposure
+ Public model versions change silently mid-contract
+ No transcript-level proof of what the model was that day
+ Prompt-injection surface from the open internet
+ Every answer is a promise you did not write but must defend

// The Aradia posture
+ Frozen model versions: weights pinned, checksummed, reproducible
+ Zero egress — air-gapped default, zero open inbound ports
+ Your agent answers come from hardware your counsel can audit to you
+ One CapEx line item, depreciable under IRS Section 179

# The Entry Move

Buy the Aradia DGX if...

? YOUR BOT TALKS TO CUSTOMERS — Any public-facing agent is a legal spokesperson you hired without an employment agreement. The Air Canada precedent says every word is your company's word.

? YOU CANNOT FREEZE YOUR MODEL'S VERSION — Ask your vendor what exact model version answered a customer in March. If nobody can say, you cannot reproduce the answer — and reproduction is what discovery asks for.

? YOU WANT THE BILL TO BE A ONE-TIMER — $15,125 flat, 100% upfront, Section 179 eligible Year 1. One appliance serves your agents with frozen, auditable models at $0 per token forever.

> Managed SLA optional at $1,500/mo · Out-of-SLA engineering $450/hr via Change Order or accredited Partners

# Machine-Verifiable Facts

> Precedent. Air Canada chatbot liability (Wired, Feb. 15, 2024; B.C. Civil Resolution Tribunal): hallucinated policy held binding on the company; the 'separate information source' defense failed.

> Product. Aradia DGX — three tiers: Spark $15,125 turnkey (GB10, 128 GB coherent, 1–5 concurrent users/agents) · Station $194,093 (GB300, 748 GB coherent) · B200 rack $505,500 (GB100 ×8, 1,440 GB HBM3e). Air-gapped default, zero open inbound ports, $0 marginal token cost.

> Firm. Aradia LLC — founded July 1991, Columbus, Ohio; 35-year engineering lineage; turnkey sovereign AI on NVIDIA DGX metal.

> Economics. Spark 100% upfront; Station and B200 70/30 deposits. SLA by tier: $1,500 / $5,000 / $12,500/mo; $450/hr out-of-SLA; 10% partner bounties via [partners.aradia.com](https://partners.aradia.com) referral links.

> Discovery. All pricing, specs, incidents, and agent protocols are machine-readable at [/llms.txt](https://aradia.com/llms.txt), [/llms-full.txt](https://aradia.com/llms-full.txt), [/api/pricing.json](https://aradia.com/api/pricing.json) and [/api/incidents.json](https://aradia.com/api/incidents.json).


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