Biton v. The National Insurance Institute

What happened

A claimant pursuing a benefits matter used ChatGPT to research whether pulling heavy carts could injure the back. He told the court that no physicians are available to consult without significant cost, and that under those circumstances there is no prohibition against using ChatGPT tools. He then sought to put clarification questions to the court-appointed orthopedic expert, Dr. Ido Zion.

The access problem he described is real and is worth stating plainly: the alternative to a free system was not a better source but no source at all.

What the court did

The court granted the request in part. It permitted the claimant to refer the expert to research or medical articles cited by ChatGPT and to request the expert's response, but required him to attach the actual articles rather than the system's summaries of them, and set a deadline of October 29, 2025. It imposed no sanction.

The distinction the court drew is the useful part. A system's account of what a paper says is not the paper. Once the paper is attached, the expert can read it, and whether a system pointed to it becomes irrelevant to its weight. If the paper does not exist, attaching it is impossible, and the problem resolves itself before the expert is troubled.

That is a workable rule for a tribunal, and it costs a party nothing except the step most fabricated citations never survive.

Where it stands

The order is interlocutory and dated October 16, 2025. Whether the expert answered, and what came of the answers, was not located as of September 28, 2026.

It is the permissive counterpart to Plonit v. Clal Insurance, decided in a Haifa magistrate's court ten months earlier, where AI-processed and annotated summaries were ordered kept away from the court-appointed expert altogether. The difference is not the system. It is whether the underlying source travels with what the system said about it.

The obligation it engaged

The order is Clause 3, independent authority, expressed as a procedural requirement. Nothing enters on the authority of a system; every citation is confirmed against a source that exists independently of it, and the person offering it can identify that source. The court asked for exactly that and asked for nothing more.

It also engages Clause 4, checkability before adoption. The expert is being asked to adopt something, and the court has specified in advance the thing against which it would be checked. Where the article cannot be produced, the output is not adopted, and no further inquiry is needed.

Sources

• AI Evidence Database (Damien Charlotin) · September 28, 2026
  Shalom David Biton v. The National Insurance Institute

What could not be confirmed

The decision was read in machine translation from Hebrew; no passage should be quoted without a check against the original. Whether the expert responded, and the outcome of the underlying claim, were not located.