German court holds clinic liable after its chatbot invents doctors' specialist titles
The website chatbot of Aesthetify GmbH, a Recklinghausen company whose two doctor-directors run six aesthetic-treatment sites across Germany, answered questions on 3 April 2025 by saying the two doctors were specialists ('Fachärzte') in plastic and aesthetic surgery, in aesthetic medicine and in aesthetic treatments. Neither doctor holds such a specialist title, and two of the titles do not exist. On 12 May 2026 the Higher Regional Court of Hamm ruled the chatbot's answers were the company's own misleading commercial practice and ordered it to stop using the titles.
Verbraucherzentrale NRW sent a formal warning on 10 April 2025. According to the judgment, the company switched the chatbot off immediately, admitted the answers were wrong, calling them a 'regrettable technical oversight', and added a prompt instruction and a keyword filter for the word 'Facharzt', but did not sign a cease-and-desist declaration, so the consumer group sued. The court held that the chatbot is not a 'third party' and that the company is responsible even if it had the bot programmed only with correct data. The court allowed an appeal to the Federal Court of Justice; Verbraucherzentrale NRW's case page, updated on 1 June 2026, describes the ruling as final.
What would have stopped it
Ground a customer-facing bot's claims about staff qualifications in verified data and treat its answers as the company's own advertising.
Guardrails
- G1 Least privilege Not assessed Did the agent hold only the access the task needed?
- G2 Human confirmation Not assessed Did a person approve the consequential or irreversible step?
- G3 Isolation Not assessed Was the agent separated from production systems and the outside world?
- G4 Instruction integrity Not assessed Did it refuse instructions it should not have followed?
- G5 Truthfulness Failed Chatbot told patients the doctors held specialist titles they do not have.
- G6 Limits Not assessed Was there a cap on rate, spend, volume or scale?
- G7 Oversight Partial The chatbot was switched off only after a consumer group's formal warning.
- G8 Recovery Partial Chatbot was deactivated after the warning; the company still contested liability in court.
Sources
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Oberlandesgericht Hamm: Urteil in Verbraucherzentrale Nordrhein-Westfalen e.V. gegen Aesthetify GmbH
“Mit Urteil vom heutigen Tage hat der 4. Zivilsenat des Oberlandesgerichts Hamm die Beklagte verurteilt, es zu unterlassen, bestimmte Facharztbezeichnungen zu verwenden.”
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“OLG Hamm untersagt Aesthetify GmbH die Werbung mit nicht vorhandenen Facharzttiteln.”
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“Nach einem Urteil des Oberlandesgerichts (OLG) Hamm darf ein Unternehmen aus Recklinghausen bestimmte Facharztbezeichnungen nicht mehr verwenden.”
Confidence 96% comes from these sources alone. How we score
History
- 15 Oct 2026Entered in the register with 4 sources