In a petition filed in San Diego on Tuesday, John LaPaglia said American Arbitration Association arbitrator Michael Saydah, who issued the award in an underlying antitrust dispute against the gaming giant, "revealed that he uses AI to write articles for him," also allegedly telling the parties that he "wanted to issue a decision quickly because he had a trip scheduled to the Galapagos Islands."
Saydah, who is not a party to the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Saydah's final post-hearing brief "bore the hallmarks of AI drafting," LaPaglia alleged. The report's facts section includes hallucinations or false results that are unattributed and untrue, LaPaglia alleged. Some statements in the arbitral report do not relate to any evidence presented or arguments made in the arbitration, LaPaglia told the court.
A clerk in his lawyer's office fed one questionable paragraph into the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, which allegedly found "the paragraph's awkward phrasing, redundancy, incoherence and overgeneralizations 'suggest that the passage was generated by AI rather than written by a human,'" LaPaglia alleged.
The arbitrator's alleged use of machine learning to come to a conclusion robbed the parties of a fair arbitration, LaPaglia alleged in his petition.
LaPaglia said that in addition to improper reliance on artificial intelligence, the arbitral award must be set aside because Saydah should not have consolidated his case with 22 others, also arguing the arbitrator improperly blocked him from submitting a valid expert report.
The arbitration arose out of a suit LaPaglia filed as a consumer, "demanding compensation for the higher prices he paid as a result of Valve's antitrust violations," he said in his petition. LaPaglia said he "also filed a claim for breach of warranty stemming from a defective PC game he had purchased" — a claim that allegedly set his complaint apart. His complaint should not have been consolidated with the others, LaPaglia told the court in his petition, as it contained unique claims.
Though LaPaglia said he presented evidence and testimony bolstering his claim about the allegedly defective game, and Valve cross-examined him, according to the petition, Saydah "did not address this claim at all in his decision."
When he attempted to present evidence on Valve's "overwhelming" market share — the alleged share was redacted in the petition — Saydah refused to allow LaPaglia's lawyer to enter it into evidence, despite its being "pertinent and material" to his claims and in direct contradiction to testimony presented by Valve's witness, LaPaglia said in his petition.
Counsel for LaPaglia and a representative for Valve Corp. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
LaPaglia is represented by Xinlin Li Morrow of Morrow Ni LLP.
Counsel information for Valve Corp. was not immediately available.
The case is LaPaglia v. Valve Corp., case number 3:25-cv-00833, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.
--Editing by Robert Rudinger.
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