A road-maintenance bidder lost a 15.5M PLN contract to AI-invented tax rulings

What happened

Exdrog won a Polish road-maintenance tender worth 15.5 million PLN, backing its unusually low VAT calculation with references to tax interpretations that supported its pricing. A competing bidder, represented by law firm BSJP, checked those citations and found they didn't exist - the tax rulings had been invented by an AI tool.

Poland's National Appeals Chamber (KIO) ruled in October 2025 that Exdrog had failed to verify AI-generated information before submitting it as the basis for a formal bid, and disqualified the company from the tender. It's believed to be the first ruling of its kind in Poland.

The business problem

A generative AI tool fabricated legal citations that looked exactly as credible as real ones, and nobody on the team checked before the bid went out.

What could have helped

• Treat AI-generated citations, figures, and legal references as unverified until someone checks them against a primary source
• Build a mandatory verification step into any document that leaves the company with legal or financial weight
• Don't assume confidence in AI output correlates with accuracy - hallucinated citations read identically to real ones
• Train the people writing bids and formal submissions specifically on this failure mode, not just general AI awareness

Where this points