Tenancy Tribunal AI Guidelines NZ: What a ChatGPT-Written Claim Now Risks (August 2026)

On 8 August 2026, the Tenancy Tribunal's principal adjudicator published official AI guidelines for New Zealand landlords and tenants, after a rise in claims written by ChatGPT and similar AI tools that Tribunal staff themselves have started calling "AI slop."

This is a follow-up. When we wrote about tenants using ChatGPT against landlords, the Tribunal itself was already on the record noticing the problem: it told OneRoof that AI-generated material was making claims longer and more complex, and one firm reported simple arrears cases taking two months instead of three or four weeks. That was the Tribunal noticing. This week it followed through with formal AI guidelines.

The trigger case, reported by the NZ Herald on 8 August 2026, was a tenant's 101-page ChatGPT-drafted report plus 215 pages of supporting evidence, seeking $40,000 in compensation from Property Brokers. The Tenancy Tribunal awarded $80.

Property Brokers general manager David Faulkner told the Herald his organisation is now seeing this "all the time": roughly 200-page AI-generated claims requesting up to $70,000, following the same recognisable pattern, and often factually wrong. Tenancy Advisory director Sarina Gibbon, who is less inclined to blame the technology itself, made a sharper point: AI mostly disadvantages tenants, not landlords, because tenants are typically less familiar with the Residential Tenancies Act and so are less able to tell when ChatGPT is confidently wrong.

What the Tenancy Tribunal's AI guidelines actually say

Based on the Herald's reporting, the substance is not new law. It restates existing rules and applies them explicitly to AI-assisted filings:

• AI-generated material is allowed, and the Tribunal spokesperson confirmed it is sometimes concise and genuinely useful.
• The Tribunal is not obliged to read past the point where a submission stops being relevant.
• Filing a bloated, unfocused, AI-inflated claim carries a real cost risk: the Tribunal can already order costs against an applicant who files frivolously or vexatiously under the RTA, and the guidance makes clear that AI slop is not exempt from that.
• Nothing about your rights or obligations under the RTA changes because AI wrote the words. As Gibbon put it: "AI does not reduce or enhance your rights and obligations under the RTA."

Does this help tenants or landlords more?

Neither, structurally, and that is the point worth sitting with. The guidance is aimed at the quality of the submission, not at who filed it. A landlord who files a padded, AI-generated damages claim is exposed to exactly the same costs risk as a tenant who does the same thing.

Where it lands harder in practice is on whoever is less able to catch the AI being wrong before they hit submit. Gibbon's read, and it matches what we see in the RTA itself, is that this is usually the tenant, simply because landlords and property managers deal with the Act more often. If you are a landlord, the honest reading of that asymmetry is not an advantage to lean on. It is a reason to keep your own filings clean, because a tribunal primed to look for AI slop will look at everything with a slightly more skeptical eye, including yours.

What this means if you are about to file

Three things carry real weight either side of a case, and none of them are things AI can generate on its own:

1. A record with dates, not a narrative. A rent ledger, notice dates, and inspection dates that line up beat pages of prose asserting what happened.
2. The actual section of the RTA, quoted, not paraphrased. If you are relying on the notice period for a rent increase, that is section 24, 60 days, once every 12 months. Quoting the source outranks a chatbot's confident summary of it.
3. A claim sized to the evidence you actually have. The guidance's real signal is that length is not persuasive on its own, and can now cost you. If your case is genuinely worth $2,000, filing for $40,000 because a chatbot suggested a number is the exact pattern the Tribunal has just been asked to push back on.

If you are currently defending against a claim rather than preparing to file one, Your Tenant Is Using ChatGPT Against You covers that side in more detail.

Why RentManager's Tribunal bundle was already built this way

We did not add anything to RentManager in response to this guidance, because the way our Tribunal claim builder works already matches what it asks for. It does not generate a narrative from a prompt. It assembles a claim from your actual stored records: the rent ledger from your bank-matched payment history, notice dates from your communications log, inspection reports and photos you already uploaded, formatted to the structure Tenancy Services expects. There is nothing for it to hallucinate, because there is nothing it invents. The length of the claim is however long your actual evidence is, not however long a language model decided to write.

That is not a feature we built because of an AI panic. It is what building the bundle from data you already have looks like, and it happens to be exactly what the Tribunal is now asking every applicant to do by hand.

FAQ: Tenancy Tribunal AI guidelines NZ

Is ChatGPT specifically named in the Tenancy Tribunal's AI guidelines?
No. The guidelines cover AI-generated material generally, whichever tool produced it. ChatGPT is named repeatedly in the reporting because it is the tool property managers say they see most often in practice, not because the Tribunal singled it out by name.

Does the Tenancy Tribunal ban AI-generated submissions?
No. The guidelines permit AI use and acknowledge it can produce concise, useful material. They target the quality and relevance of what is filed, not the tool used to draft it.

Can I be ordered to pay costs for a ChatGPT-generated claim?
The costs power already exists in the RTA for frivolous or vexatious applications. The new guidelines make clear that a bloated AI-generated claim, ChatGPT-written or otherwise, is not treated differently from any other weak filing when that power is considered.

Does using AI change my rights under the Residential Tenancies Act?
No. The Tribunal spokesperson and Tenancy Advisory both confirmed this directly: AI does not add to or subtract from what the RTA already gives you.

If you're a tenant reading this

The same advice applies to you, with or without RentManager. Keep your own dated records: photos with timestamps, your messages with the landlord, receipts, the actual RTA section you're relying on. A short claim built on real, dated evidence will always do better in front of an adjudicator than a long one built on AI-generated prose, and it costs you nothing to keep.

See it on your own property

If you are a landlord or property manager, you do not have to take our word for how the bundle looks. Add one of your own properties to the RentManager demo and open the ready-to-file Tribunal bundle on a seeded tenancy. No signup required to look.