Thierry Rignol is furious at Yale. He paid the school $208,500 for Executive MBA tuition only to be accused of cheating in his Sourcing and Managing Funds course. Despite being a top student on track for valedictorian status, he was suspended for a year and failed the final exam.

The dispute began when Rignol’s exam answers were flagged as possibly AI-generated by GPTZero, an AI detection tool often unreliable in its assessments. Yale had previously acknowledged that policing AI use through such tools is unfeasible due to their well-known weaknesses.

Rignol argues his test writing was a product of his intelligence and formal French background, which he claims the detector wrongly misidentified as AI-generated text. His lawsuit, filed under a fictitious name and now sprawling across 125 docket entries, also accuses Yale of censoring his conservative political speech.

The case highlights the complex challenges in detecting AI usage within academic settings and raises questions about how universities will navigate these issues going forward.