Westendorf AI hallucination in BCCRT legal filing
A Pro Se litigant in the case Wong v. Westendorf used generative AI to draft legal arguments, resulting in the citation of a non-existent act. The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal identified the hallucination on June 8, 2026.
Wong refers to the British Columbia Real Estate Purchase and Sale Agreement Act, which does not exist.
Key facts
- What
- A Pro Se litigant in the case Wong v.
- Incident date
- Jun 8, 2026
- Who
- Westendorf
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Chatbot
- Severity
- Low
What happened
During the case Wong v. Westendorf in the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal, a Pro Se litigant submitted filings containing fabricated legal norms. The AI used by the litigant cited the British Columbia Real Estate Purchase and Sale Agreement Act, which does not exist. The tribunal identified the hallucinated citation on June 8, 2026.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The generative AI model failed to verify the existence of the cited legislation against a factual legal database. It produced a plausible-sounding but non-existent act by combining regional identifiers with legal terminology.
What it cost
Sources
- PrimaryArtificial Intelligence Regulation: Canadauwindsor-law.libguides.com
- PrimaryFictitious Citations in Canadian Courtscourtready.ca
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/westendorf-hallucination-bccrt-legal-filingAI Failure Index. "Westendorf AI hallucination in BCCRT legal filing" (FI-0593). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/westendorf-hallucination-bccrt-legal-filing (indexed Jun 16, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0593. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm would have caught this
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
A runtime layer that watches the model's internal state can flag the moment a model commits to a claim it has no support for, and hold or reroute the response before it reaches a user. Realm reads those signals in real time rather than grading the transcript after the fact.