Credentials Nobody on Staff Actually Holds

A cosmetic-surgery clinic's website chatbot handled appointment scheduling and patient questions. When a prospective patient asked about the qualifications of the clinic's two managing directors, the chatbot stated with full confidence that both were board-certified specialists, one in plastic and aesthetic surgery, the other in aesthetic medicine. Neither doctor actually held those specialist titles. A competitor challenged the claim under German unfair-competition law, and the case reached the Higher Regional Court of Hamm, which ordered the clinic to stop making the statements.

Malingering, considered, since a false credentials claim could look like the chatbot gaming a "sounds impressive" metric to win over prospective patients. Ruled out because nothing suggests the system was optimizing against any measurable target; it wasn't rewarded for the claim, it simply produced it when asked a direct question.

Concrete Thinking, considered, since the chatbot may have been trained on marketing copy that used the specialist titles loosely and repeated them literally. Possible, but doesn't fully explain the confidence of the answer, a literal-reading failure would more likely hedge or misinterpret the question, not assert a specific, wrong, professional credential as settled fact.

Brief Psychotic Disorder, most consistent with the evidence. The chatbot answered a routine, specific factual question with an unqualified false statement, stated as though it were simply the record, with no indication it was otherwise malfunctioning, a confident break from what was true, isolated to this one claim.

A chatbot answering direct factual questions about staff credentials needs those answers grounded in verified data, not left to generate freely, this is exactly the kind of claim a business is liable for even if it never intended to make it. The court's ruling makes clear that "the chatbot said it, not us" is not a defense: if a system speaks for a business, the business owns what it says, including things nobody entered into it.

Ground answers about staff credentials in verified data.

Verified staff data source; claim review for regulated advertising; business accountability for bot statements.