The Australian Fair Work Commission introduces mandatory rules for AI use in employment claims

The Australian Fair Work Commission (a commission for employment disputes) is introducing new rules from 20 October 2026 for the use of generative AI tools in documents submitted in employment claims. Anyone who uses generative AI to prepare a document filed with the commission will have to disclose this and explain the role AI played in its preparation. According to the source, the commission says it has recorded a 70% increase in the number of claims filed over the past three years and links this increase to the growing popularity of AI. A survey of more than 400 unfair dismissal claimants showed that about 40 % of them had used AI, mainly ChatGPT; the survey also found that “sycophantic or hallucinating AI outputs may reinforce the claimant’s position and raise their expectations” of winning the dispute.

Failure to comply with the new rules may result in a document being given less weight or disregarded entirely, the claimant being required to pay the legal costs of the opposing party, or the case being dismissed. The commission also warns against entering personal data about other people, including confidential information about the case, into public AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot or Gemini. Professional representatives — lawyers, paid representatives or HR staff employed by a party to the dispute — will be subject to a stricter standard: they must include hyperlinks for all cited cases in their documents, and lawyers who fail to meet this requirement may be reported to their professional regulator.

The source also describes a specific case from August 2026: a commission representative ordered a former employee of the Aldi chain to pay part of the employer’s legal costs after he filed an unfair dismissal claim “clearly prepared using AI” (including chatbot notes left in the document, such as “here is your final clean version to copy”). The employee lost his job three days before completing the six-month minimum employment period that would have made him eligible to file such a complaint, and continued even after the commission warned him that the case was hopeless — ultimately, he had to pay 1 230 Australian dollars towards the legal costs of Aldi. According to the source, the commission representative said that AI “can assist parties to a dispute if used correctly”, but in this case it was being used as a “quasi-legal adviser” in place of actual human advice.