Making a claim at the Fair Work Commission? These are the new AI rules you need to follow

Creative Images Lab/Getty Images A record 44,039 Australians lodged claims at the Fair Work Commission between July 2025 and April 2026.

Those claims cover everything from unfair dismissal and underpayment disputes to bullying, sexual harassment and, most recently, arguments over the right to disconnect .

In late August, the commission declared it’s facing an “unprecedented growth in its workload” – linking a 70% surge in claims over the past three years to the growing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI).

A survey of more than 400 unfair dismissal applicants from earlier this year revealed about 40% had used AI , mainly ChatGPT.

It also found “sycophantic or hallucinatory AI outputs may reinforce the applicant’s position, elevating their expectations” of winning their case.

That’s why, from October 20 onwards, the Fair Work Commission will enforce new rules on how to use AI and properly disclose it.

Here’s what you need to know about those rules, and why trusting AI too blindly could end up costing you money and your case.

What are the new rules? Under new guidelines and updated forms , anyone who uses generative AI to help prepare a document lodged in a commission case will be required to: disclose if, and how, generative AI was used check all facts and legal evidence in your document are correct – and this checking needs to be done by a human, not another AI tool, and ensure any witness statement is based on the witness’s own knowledge and words, and is declared to be true.

Failing to comply with those new rules could see documents given less weight or being disregarded; you could be ordered to pay others’ legal costs; or the case could be dismissed.

The commission also warns people not to enter personal information about others – including confidential case information – into public AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot or Gemini.

Lawyers and even OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman have also warned about serious legal and privacy risks of doing so.

The Fair Work Commission made this short animation about rules coming into force from October 20.

Professional representatives – such as lawyers, paid agents or human resources advisers employed by a party in a Fair Work Commission case – will be held to a higher standard.

In their documents, they’ll be required to include hyperlinks to all cited cases.