Ask ChatGPT for small-business grants in your province and you'll get a fast, tidy list. Some of it will be real. The problem is you can't tell which part.
What AI assistants do well
AI is a fast, capable research assistant. It can help you think through eligibility and draft the text of an application. With real-time web browsing, a program announced last week can even show up.
Why it can't tell you what's open
An AI language model is trained up to a fixed point in time. Anything that happened after that date is missing from what it learned. A grant that closed, changed, or reopened after that cutoff is invisible to the model, and the model may fill the gap with confident but false statements.
The most common failure is a program that stopped taking applications a year or two ago, still described as open. An AI doesn't tell you when it's wrong.
"But it browses the web now"
Real-time browsing helps, but it doesn't fix the core problem. Browsing often finds the same expired listings that appear everywhere else on the web, and the AI repeats them. A link to an out-of-date page is not proof the program is open. If the AI pulled a 2024 deadline page, it will give you a 2024 deadline as if it were current.
The problem is not limited to grants. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, a British Columbia tribunal found a company's own AI chatbot gave a confident answer that contradicted the real policy, and held the company liable. The tribunal's point applies to any AI answer: "there is no reason why [the user] should know that one section is accurate, and another is not." You cannot spot the wrong grant in an AI's list yourself, because nothing marks it as wrong.
How to check an AI's grant list
- Take the program name, not the status. Use the AI to learn which programs exist. Then confirm whether each one is open on a source that checks its status.
- Find the official government page. A real program names its exact administrator and links its own page. If the AI cannot point you to that page, be careful.
- Watch for exact dollar figures and deadlines given with no source and no link to check.
- Check the date. "As of 2026" from a model trained earlier is not the same as verified this month.
Where BBN Labs fits
We check every program on our list with its official government source and show the date we last verified it. When a program's deadline passes, we mark it closed and watch for it to reopen. When a program fits, we explain the rules and send deadline alerts. You apply on the official program site.
In short: ChatGPT is a good place to start, but do not stop there. It can name a grant. It cannot tell you whether the grant is still open.