Sacré bleu! This is a wild story. It’s about a Yale AI-cheating dispute that turned into a 13-count federal lawsuit with no end in sight.

As discussed by Nate Anderson in ArsTechnica (How a Yale AI-cheating dispute became a 13-count federal lawsuit, available here), Thierry Rignol paid Yale $208,500 in tuition for its Executive MBA program. He claims he was a “top student, on track to graduate first in his class”.

Then came his final exam in the spring 2024 session of MGT423E (Sourcing and Managing Funds). The test ran for four hours and was self-timed; it was “open book” but “closed Internet.” AI tools were strictly disallowed. Students wrote answers on their computers, generated PDFs from those files, and submitted the PDFs to their instructors. Of 72 students, only Rignol’s exam was flagged by a teaching assistant for possible AI use, in part because of its unusual length.

One of the course’s professors expressed suspicions about the exam – he used an AI detection tool called GPTZero on Rignol’s text. First, he said, GPTZero thought it likely that AI was used in several answers. Second, one answer showed “substantial overlap” with output generated by ChatGPT in response to the same question. Third, Rignol “performed relatively poorly on question 5, where AI tools were the least helpful.” Finally, the teaching team questioned—though without testing the theory—whether anyone could have produced an exam of that length and polish within four hours.

Rignol’s claimed his long, perfectly formatted test answers were the product of his own intelligence. He also called out “GPTZero’s known bias against non-native English speakers” like himself, and argued that detectors can mistake the formal, structured prose of such writers for AI-generated text.

I can’t speak specifically to GPTZero, but I can speak to a test I ran on Zero GPT Detector from ChatGPT, which said that a blog post I wrote (totally from scratch – honest!) was 92% likely to be AI. So, I can understand the claim.

Rignol initially learned that he would receive an “Incomplete” in the course while the issue was investigated.

In the meantime, Yale said it had asked twice for the Microsoft Word file that produced the PDF file he submitted for the exam by August 10, followed up again on August 12 and (after Rignol expressed confusion about what was being asked of him and why) again on August 16 and August 19.

So, the Honor Committee sent out its “official notification letter” telling Rignol that he was accused of “improperly utiliz[ing] AI on the final exam in [his] course.” The committee wanted to meet in October; Rignol told them he was getting married in Europe and asked to postpone (which was granted).

It wasn’t until the hearing on November 8 that the apparent contradiction arose about the word “Word.” Throughout the process, Yale had been asking for Word files. Rignol explained to the committee that he didn’t have any relevant Word files. He said he had written the exam answers in Apple Pages.

All those months and no clarification until the hearing. When the Honor Committee meeting ended, they asked for a copy of the Pages file Rignol had mentioned and he provided it an hour later. They asked him to come back so they could examine his laptop. He asked if next week would work.

It would not. That evening, Rignol received a letter stating that the Honor Committee (while not ruling on the substance of the allegations) had found Rignol liable for “not being forthcoming”—which Yale treated as a separate honor code violation.

Rignol was suspended for a year. In late November, the Honor Committee further decided that he had “violated the rules of the Sourcing and Managing Funds final exam” and imposed an F.

So, the Yale AI-cheating dispute turned into a lawsuit. Rignol sued the school and his lawsuit has been running since February 2025. It opened with a motion to “Proceed in Fictitious Name”—which was denied—and has since sprawled across 125 docket entries and a highly unusual third amended complaint. It appears to be nowhere near trial.

However, Rignol has encountered some skepticism. As one judge said during a hearing, “Wouldn’t a reasonable professional person who was trying to be cooperative with a proceeding upon getting not just one email but many emails asking for the underlying document that was used to create a PDF say, ‘Oh, I didn’t use Word. I used Pages, a different word processing [program]?’”

You would think.

In the meantime, Rignol claims that Yale is against him and that the whole “sham” disciplinary process was designed to censor his “protected conservative political speech” after he advocated in courses for “smaller government, pro-business policies, and skepticism of DEI.”

Suing the school? Claiming political motives? Thierry Rignol may be French, but it seems as though he’s adapted quite well to the American way of life. 😉

So, what do you think? Can you believe that a Yale AI-cheating dispute has turned into a 13-count federal lawsuit? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using DALL-E 3, using the term “robot holding a page with the capital letter ‘Y’ in dark blue outlined in black”.

Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by my employer, my partners or my clients. eDiscovery Today is made available solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Today should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.