AI is a Non-Deterministic Guest in a Deterministic House: Stop Building Chatbots, Start Building Sandboxes

The Signal: The Legally Binding Hallucination Recently, a major airline's customer support chatbot hallucinated a bereavement fare policy. A customer claimed the refund, the airline refused, and a tribunal ruled in favor of the customer. The chatbot was deemed a legal agent of the company. The failure wasn't that the LLM hallucinated—it’s that it was allowed to speak directly to the customer and the database without a chaperone. When you give a non-deterministic guest unregulated access to your