Yale's GPTZero Wrongful-Suspension Lawsuit — An MBA Student Fights a Year-Long Ban Over an AI-Detection Flag

In June 2024, a teaching assistant in Yale School of Management's 'Sourcing and Managing Funds' course flagged the open-book, no-internet final exam of MBA student Thierry Rignol, a French national, as likely AI-written, citing 'unusually long and elaborate' formatting and 'near-perfect punctuation and grammar.' The instructor ran portions of the answers through the AI-detection tool GPTZero to support the suspicion.
Yale's Honor Committee found Rignol liable both for the original AI-use allegation and for 'not being forthcoming' during the investigation, imposing a one-year suspension from the Executive MBA programme and a failing grade in the course.
In February 2025, Rignol filed a federal lawsuit against Yale and five named officials, alleging national-origin discrimination under the Civil Rights Act, due-process violations, coercive investigative tactics, breach of contract, and defamation, and claiming one dean suggested he could face deportation. Yale's own materials acknowledge that no AI-detection tool can establish AI use with certainty. A judge denied Rignol's request for a preliminary injunction, and litigation continued into 2026 with a jury trial sought.
The case has become a widely cited cautionary example of the legal and equity risks of disciplining students based on unreliable AI-detection tools, echoing findings elsewhere — including a 2025 U.S. Federal Trade Commission action against an AI-detector vendor whose advertised '98% accuracy' was found to perform near chance — that have led several universities to disable AI-detection software altogether.

Read the full analysis: https://yaledailynews.com/articles/som-student-sues-yale-alleges-wrongful-suspension-over-ai-use