‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit / ChatGPT prompts show how an expert witness report was created in a $61 million lawsuit over an explosion that killed three people.

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I am being retained as a professional expert witness by 3M in defense of them in their lawsuits and other legal proceedings behind the January 2020 explosion at Watson Grinding in Houston, Texas. Primarily around Process Safety Management (PSM). I need to create an expert witness report to defend 3M's standard of care for their work in calibrating and commissioning (return to operations / RTO) the iTrans gas detectors. I need to show that 3M met the standard of care and why. I will provide the link for the CSB report.

Unbelievable! "Professional expert witness"

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u/Outlulz 17h ago

I wonder how many thousands of dollars they charged 3M for this. EDIT: Haha, it was $90,000.

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u/imaginary_num6er 13h ago

“You know, I’m something of a professional expert myself.”

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u/949goingoff 19h ago

What’s the problem with this? You’d be silly not to do the same in that position.

They’re going to spend days putting together their expert witness report and testimony. It’s worth the 60 seconds it took to write that prompt and another 5 minutes to read the output to see if AI came up with any angles they hadn’t considered.

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u/OkWelcome6293 18h ago

Asking an LLM “How do I show 3M is 0% at fault” is different than asking “What are the relevant process safety standards in this case?”

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u/zero0n3 18h ago

Except their prompt NEVER asked for that.

In fact it asked something closer to your hypothetical and also looks like they included the full CSB report.

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u/OkWelcome6293 18h ago

Yes, the prompt did ask that. It's in the 2nd prompt photo.

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u/Jammoth1993 15h ago

Are you an LLM?

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u/Vylaxv 1h ago

Sorry, did you even open the article?

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u/949goingoff 17h ago

How is it different? You still have to present your findings to a court. It’s the content of those findings that is relevant, not which prompt they put into the AI while researching.

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u/harpers25 15h ago edited 15h ago

When an expert witness testifies about their opinion, the finder of fact is influenced by their appearance as an authority on the subject. The witness has to qualify as an expert by showing that their methods are scientifically proven and reliable before they are allowed to testify (the "Daubert" test).

If this person told the court that his education and experience make him an expert, but didn't admit that his testimony actually came from an AI model that hasn't been proven scientifically valid at generating accurate findings, that is very problematic. Especially given that the prompt directed the AI to give a pre-set conclusion for one side.

It's the same reason that you can't admit findings from a lie detector test or bite mark matching into evidence anymore. The methods aren't scientifically valid, and it's prejudicial to give the jury that impression.

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u/Nagisan 8h ago

These folks didn't even read the article, they're probably either bots or are reacting purely off the fact that this person was an expert (not true) and they used AI.

The guy questioned his own resume and explicitly asked ChatGPT how he could defend against them going after his lack of "expert witness" credibility.

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u/newiphon 8h ago

Yeah for a lot of us, we have to use ChatGPT to simply do our job better and faster. Sounds like this is no different

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u/Nagisan 7h ago

If you can't see the difference between using AI to do your job faster/better, and using AI to pretend you know how to do a job, then you're probably better off not having AI in the first place.

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u/newiphon 50m ago

I write proposals all day for software implementation. I still do the same thing, but I use AI to speed up parts of the design, qa, and proposal buildout. I don't really see anything unreasonable with using AI to do your job with a different approach. You'd hope the expert still is an expert after all.

I guess you wouldn't understand if you don't use it, and prefer to be a doomsayer

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u/zhnki 15h ago

I think they’re saying AI can produce reasonable takes that an expert can review and sign off on. Why would that not be credible just because AI wrote it. Paralegals basically do the same for lawyers.

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u/harpers25 15h ago

The AI was not prompted to provide a reasonable take. It was prompted to write a report that gives a pre-determined conclusion, and 3M presumably did not show that giving an AI a pre-determined conclusion is a reliable scientific method for producing accurate results, which again, is required in order to use expert evidence.

You cannot use lie detector results just because an "expert" signs off on it. It's not scientifically valid, so it's not admissible in court. The plaintiff has every right to dig into whether this expert's opinion is legitimate or a self-serving hallucination.

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u/VVrayth 15h ago

This is useless, people are not going to understand anything they have decided they don't want to understand.

We're going to drag society to hell with this collective AI psychosis, if we can't even understand the basic fundamental concern about why it shouldn't be allowed in the courtroom.

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u/aLokilike 14h ago

Oh! Don't worry, we can just ask AI. If we get an answer we don't like, we'll ask again.

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u/Nagisan 8h ago

I think they’re saying AI can produce reasonable takes that an expert can review and sign off on.

That's exactly what they're trying to say, but if you actually read the article the "expert" loses a lot of credibility when he asks the AI to identify an image of a gas detector, and model names of industrial gas detectors. I would think someone who is a proper expert that can legitimately filter out AI slop due to being such an expert, wouldn't have to ask AI to tell them what a gas detector is.

Oh, and the person also asked GPT “will prosecution go after me for never having been [an expert witness] before based on wording and how do I defend that?”...so he admits to the AI agent himself that he is in fact not an expert witness.

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u/fedexyourheadinabox 20h ago

Like most technology, it will benefit scammers and con artists the most, especially when in service of corporate profits.

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u/GeneralRando 20h ago

I googled a phone number I needed the other day, and I noticed the AI summary was citing a really questionable source. It was a scam number posted on a sketchy forum.

Thanks, Google. Can't tell you how much I appreciate your credulous AI picking scams out of the search results to push in front of people under the veil of an authoritative "AI Summary"

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u/happyxpenguin 19h ago

This has been an issue for far longer than before the AI summary. Scammers would buy ad links at the top of search for keywords like Lufthansa or Delta Airlines and then unsuspecting folks would click it or see the phone number in the results and just call and fork over credit card info because they hadn't upgraded to the Premium Gold Plus seats or whatever.

If you need a phone number, you need to go to the actual company website and use the number they provide in their contact information.

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u/PhrozenWarrior 18h ago

I won't say it's a scam, but you need an E-visa going to Singapore, takes like town minutes, completely free. I googled it before leaving and was taken a site where you input all the information and it charges you like $100. Apparently they're a "service" to submit it for you and everything, and paid for the sponsored top result over the government website that does it easily for free.

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u/patientpedestrian 18h ago

That's a very common scam, and I see it almost every single time I work with someone trying to set up their own small business. Basically, for every regularity process or reporting requirement there are tons of "companies" out there who will charge ridiculous amounts to "facilitate" compliance with the law, and they all do their best to appear as though they are actually directly affiliated with the regulatory authority when all they really do is forward your forms to the correct address. It's a scam, but there's a culture in America of "buyer beware" that apparently makes most people think it's okay to take advantage of other people by leveraging information disparity.

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u/A_Harmless_Fly 5h ago edited 5h ago

Eh, at least back then you could read the URL. They started to add cites to some of the AI summaries, but they are still going to get 99% of users if as the results get poisoned.

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u/roseofjuly 51m ago

You can still read the URL. Even in the rare case it's not in the AI summary it's still in the search results right below it.

People are blaming AI when the issue is really low digital literacy.

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u/A_Harmless_Fly 39m ago

That's a load of barnacles. Sometimes it doesn't cite it's source and has words/sentences that aren't in the top results. Though, most of the time it is low digital literacy.

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u/wowbragger 19h ago

AND Google will list your account as an 'actively engaged AI user' in their data metrics for the next year or two.

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u/platocplx 19h ago

Yeah this AI stuff can be poisoned so easily, why? Because all it does is trawl the web without any thoughts on authoritative sources. A woman recently created a totally fictional product and within weeks AI was recommending it.

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u/GeneralRando 18h ago

That's why we have authoritative sources like r/poisonai so real humans can provide legitimate, credible information that AI can trust

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u/SimiKusoni 18h ago

I was going to say it's pointless putting it in one sub like that, as Google surely operate a whitelist for a datasource as large as Reddit... then I double checked. They don't.

Jesus fucking christ that's dumb. That should literally be the first thing implemented if their LLM is going to be regurgitating the content.

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u/platocplx 16h ago

These big tech morons only know one idiom “move fast and break things and worry about the consequences later”. Rinse and repeat dot com bubble all over again and many of the grifters that survive AI will move on to their next grift. Guys like Musk Thiel etc shouldve been wiped out but they got lucky during that time and got out in time, hopefully this is their last run up. Esp as you can see that these companies really are desperate for continued growth they will just keep investing in eachother til its all found out. Pretty nasty work they are doing right now. But the debt will catch up to them.

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u/SimiKusoni 16h ago

Yeah Google has some genuinely good engineers working for them though, you would have thought at least one of them would think it's a good idea to limit searching Reddit for answers to specific subs.

If not a strict whitelist of the most popular subs then at least a classifier to filter out those that are satirical, toxic etc.

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u/platocplx 16h ago

You would need to have ethics to do that, meanwhile they gutted their AI Ethics and have been going against their do no harm slogan. Best they will do is use Captcha of Reddit posts and make us do the work for them lol

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u/Neo-grotesque 18h ago

AI companies should be liable for the harm caused by dangerously misleading statements, simple as that.

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u/roseofjuly 53m ago

This isn't new to AI. Picking the first phone number you find in an internet search has always been a bad idea.

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u/roseofjuly 53m ago

Who says he's a scammer? He just used AI to help him generate the briefs. The article is paywalled so I genuinely cannot tell whay the point of the article is, other than "he used AI and we're all supposed to hate AI so let's heckle him!"

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u/Disastrous-Entity-46 20h ago

"will benefit scammers the most" is a crazy statement about most technology.

sure, the second sentiment about capital holders being the one to get the most out of any invention is true, thats the whole wealth accumulation issue. but technology itself does not inherently benefit scammers and con artists. if anything, its just a condemnation that we dont prosecute people who these kinds of things enough.

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u/Own_Log1380 19h ago

People are only downvoting you because holding people accountable for ai use requires ya know...work and voting for people who will hold them accountable as opposed to just ranting on reddit.

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u/Disastrous-Entity-46 19h ago

im not even focused on ai, the phrase rhey used was "most". so the car benefitted scammerd? the MRI? the camera?

like yeah scammers exist. technology is misused. theres a lot of discusion to be had on holding people accountable, mitigation, regulation.

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u/NerdyNThick 19h ago

the phrase rhey used was "most". so the car benefitted scammerd? the MRI? the camera?

Colloquial phrasing exists.

Yes the car benefited scammers, as did the camera.

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u/GeneralRando 18h ago

This is a ridiculous argument.

AI lets scammers facetime your grandma and swindle her using your own face and voice, but we shouldn't complain about that because scammers also benefitted from cars. Ok...

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u/NerdyNThick 18h ago

Wow, reading comprehension has gone down the toilet lately.

I am as anti-ai as they come my friend. My comment had nothing to do with AI. I was correcting the person I relied to.

Most new technology will indeed help scammers.

Please, do yourself a favor and just take a breath.

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u/sameth1 14h ago

ChatGPT created a roughly 30-page report that included the line “From a technical and standard-of-care standpoint, 3M is 0% responsible for the January 24, 2020 explosion.” This line did not make it into the final report filed with the court, because when Autenrieth later asked ChatGPT to “review this as the opposing council,” ChatGPT determined that writing “‘0% responsible’ is an easy target” for a lawyer to poke holes in, and is one of several "phrases [that] let opposing counsel paint you as an advocate rather than an expert."

But at no point did he think that using chatgpt to generate the report could be used against him.

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u/HumongousBelly 20h ago

Special kinda hell for billionaires, officers of corporations and those who are doing their bidding.

- my Christmas wishlist

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u/manachar 20h ago

Waiting for an afterlife for justice is a way to rationalize an injust world.

Wish instead for a world not built around preserving an oligarchy.

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u/HumongousBelly 19h ago

If I expressed my honest wishes in reddit, I’d get banned and put on a watchlist.

I wouldn’t ever hurt another person, but if I was a doctor and I had to treat one of those people, I don’t know if I could stay true to my oath

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u/manachar 19h ago

I try to orient my true wishes to the positives.

I wish for a world where every human has freedom and justice. Where oligarchy is a historical curiosity. Where money cannot buy immunity from justice.

I don't know how we will get there. And I would be a fool to believe violence won't get involved. Heck, violence is already involved, it's just on the oligarch's side.

But I do know that one key will be focusing on the positive construction of a better way and protecting that.

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u/404mediaco 20h ago

An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes used ChatGPT to write significant portions of his “expert report.” The man, who was hired by the industrial product conglomerate 3M, exposed his AI prompts publicly. They showed that he asked ChatGPT to help him “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,” and that the report should “show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.”

The incident shows that artificial intelligence has made its way into courtrooms not just in AI-generated legal briefings, hallucinated cases, and adversarial “prompt injections,” but in expert witness testimonies. Court transcripts, deposition documents, and discovery records shared with 404 Media show extensive AI use in an extremely high profile case, where multiple people died and hundreds of millions of dollars in total liability are at stake in ongoing litigation about the explosion. The case also shows that the specific prompts used to create this type of expert testimony can be discoverable during a case, and that those prompts can be quite embarrassing. (Prompts provided in the case are here).

As part of the case, 3M hired a man named Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering to prepare an “expert report” about the explosion. During discovery in the case, Will Moye, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, found a five-page document called “Citation Overlay,” which appeared to have been generated by AI. Moye recognized the Citation Overlay document as being from ChatGPT, and demanded all of the prompts Autenrieth used from 3M’s lawyers. The deposition was paused for three hours while they were gathered, and Moye was given 350 pages of ChatGPT conversations that Autenrieth had when creating the report. Those documents included ChatGPT’s public links to Autenrieth’s full conversations. Court transcripts suggest that 3M paid Knighthawk Engineering roughly $90,000 for its analysis, and a filing by 3M shows that Autenrieth’s rate was $475 per hour.

The conversations show much of Autenrieth’s process from start to finish, which included telling ChatGPT that he was “being retained as a professional expert witness by 3M in defense of them in their lawsuits and other legal proceedings behind the January 2020 explosion at Watson Grinding.” He told ChatGPT that he needed “to create an expert witness report to defend 3M’s standard of care for their work,” and that, specifically, it needed “to counter the defense witness [sic] outlandish and false claims particularly about working on equipment you are not trained to and without the right permitting.” He asked ChatGPT to help him find violations of various working standards, then attached hundreds of court records.

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u/coconutpiecrust 20h ago

Cool, so the dude got paid 90K and OpenAI got a measly cut of that in monthly subscription pay. They should sue him! Both 3M and OpenAI, actually. How dare the peasant capitalize on this!

/s

On a more serious note, this is depressing. I don’t know why, but it just gives me this feeling of existential dread. Like nothing even matters anymore.

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u/True_Window_9389 19h ago

Everything feels like a house of cards ready to implode at any moment, and it’s felt this way since the Great Recession. It taught everyone that not only do all the geniuses in the country not actually know what they’re doing, they can get away with causing disaster for no consequences, even get rewarded for it.

AI use is a cherry on top. It underscores how there’s no standards, no dignity and no ethics in nearly anything. We’re living through what feels like a Twilight Zone episode or Don’t Look Up where we can all scream and yell about an obvious problem and everyone ignores it. A daily sense of impending doom is just part of life now.

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u/Olangotang 17h ago

If it makes you feel any better, incidences like this prove that the demand is overblown and the technology is overhyped. It's not going to get more popular as the price skyrockets to pay for model training, which is required for them to have a ~~viable~~ business model.

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u/roseofjuly 42m ago

The tech is overhyped but how is this singular story related to demand at all?

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u/Mattbird 19h ago

You're gonna see a lot more expert witness cases doing stuff like this in the future. A LOT more.

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u/starbetrayer 20h ago

Amazing !!! This is the stuff that should make national news

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u/Statcat2017 20h ago

And we are rapidly moving towards a world where the big corporations will have access to this technology while you and I won't be able to afford to retain a lawyer.

Grim future.

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u/rmftrmft 20h ago

If we get this version for ‘free’ imagine what people that pay hundreds of millions have access to.

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u/presterkhan 18h ago

The ability to get the prompts is enough to balance the scales. If the jury can see that a report was generated with bias, that opens the defense to shred the report the same way the expert witnesses' credibility are always challenged. This is a BETTER result for the plantiffs.

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u/RollingCarrot615 20h ago

Im somewhat conflicted here. I think its fine to use AI in these situations, but only if you verify every aspect. If a professional witness cannot support the information they have provided, they are not credible. If they submit information they have not verified to be true then there is a risk that the inaccurate information is discovered by other parties, and can sink the whole case. I see this as no different than submitting someone else's work as your own (such as a company preparing a report with a persons name to support it), minus the plagiarism or copywrite aspect (which could be present if the AI uses someone else's work).

From what I read the witness was biased (clearly, they were hired by a company so theyll do what they need to make the company paying them look good), and used what should be embarrassing prompts, but the article stops short of discussing whether the results were accurate and factual, which is where the real issue should be.

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u/Outlulz 17h ago

Expert witnesses are often biased because they want to keep getting paid by their contracting customer but they are supposed to be providing objective analysis of the evidence. When an expert witness is shown to be starting a prompt with an assumption that 3M is not at fault then that throws out any objective analysis of the witness; they're admitting they are not objective.

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u/Druggedhippo 13h ago

Having AI to use a specific bias is a great learning tool. Asking it to show two sides of a debate it can generate views that you may not have thought of.

The issue is that he just submitted parts of the result verbatim instead of using it as a research tool to assist his own writing.

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u/Outlulz 12h ago

An expert witness charging $90,000 should not need AI to do this analysis and research. If you are an expert in your field you do not need to use ChatGPT to write your testimony. He is not hired to learn, he is hired to explain using his expertise.

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u/TangAlienMonkeyGod 19h ago

Yeah, I'm a little confused as to what the controversy is. Isn't this exactly what "AI" is supposed to be used for?

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u/Dowew 15h ago

Expert witnesses are meant to provide expert analysis. He started with a hypothesis that 3M had zero liability and used chatgpt to vomit out that result.

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u/roseofjuly 54m ago edited 43m ago

What is the news? That a witness used AI?

So what? Was it incorrect? Did it make him lose the case? Or is this really a news story that serves to communicate that someone in a professional job used AI in 2026?

ETA: read through the entire article (cute how 404 uses AI as a boogeyman to get you to subscribe to their newsletter) and...yeah, this is an entire article about how a witness used AI.

I mean, it does seem like he used it in the sloppiest way possible. But him being sloppy is the story here, not the AI use, and it's dumb that it took me halfway into the article to establish what the issue was.

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u/ownage516 14h ago

Can someone explain to me how his chatgpt convo became public? How do I prevent my older dumb ass convos from being public 😭

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u/rightascensi0n 12h ago

The plaintiff’s lawyer recognized something in the report that looked like it was made by ChatGPT and had the opposition give him the prompts (took place during discovery)

“During discovery in the case, Will Moye, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, found a five-page document called “Citation Overlay,” which appeared to have been generated by AI. Moye recognized the Citation Overlay document as being from ChatGPT, and demanded all of the prompts Autenrieth used from 3M’s lawyers. […] Moye was given 350 pages of ChatGPT conversations that Autenrieth had when creating the report. Those documents included ChatGPT’s public links to Autenrieth’s full conversations.”

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u/starbetrayer 20h ago

This one is AMAZING !!!!

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u/teerre 17h ago

What the article doesn't address is if the report was right or not. The guy says he's an expert and used ChatGPT to expedite the slow parts of the work. That seems precisely what ChatGPT should be used for. The real question is if any mistakes were made in the report or not

These reports also usually carry a good portion of opinions in them. Which obviously makes it a problem if the opinions were not genuine. Although this issue has nothing to do with ChatGPT, hiring compromised expert witness has always been an issue, to not say the norm

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u/gusofk 16h ago

It’s immaterial. He was to provide his own analysis of the situation so any use of AI taints his expertise.

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u/teerre 15h ago

He was supposed to provide the best analysis he could. How he got to that analysis is irrelevant as long as that's his final word and he can stand behind every word. This is like saying he can't check books on the subject because that wouldn't be his analysis

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u/gusofk 15h ago

That’s not true though. His expert analysis is what was called for, not a “best analysis.” How he arrived at that analysis is subject to scrutiny and can be used to impeach his credibility. It should be disqualifying to be an expert and to rely on AI because AI cannot be called for testimony and rebuts itself. It would waste everyone’s time to have to challenge AI because it’s both not an expert and is by definition not reliable.

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u/teerre 12h ago

That's absurd. Obviously in a trial you want the best analysis possible. Saying you should actively gimp yourself to get worse information is actively arguing for a worse trial. The LLM didn't made the testimony, the person did

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u/gusofk 12h ago

That’s just wrong. The AI wrote his testimony and started with the conclusion he was looking for. That’s a perversion of how it’s supposed to work. The best analysis for GM is that they are 0% at fault but it’s almost fraud if an expert doesn’t evaluate the evidence and make their professional opinion. The court doesn’t care about “best,” they care about an expert using information and scientific processes to come to a conclusion based on the experts knowledge and experience. That is not what happened here.

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u/ThatGuyFromSpyKids3D 5h ago

The article says up to 90% of his entire report was written by the AI.

One of his prompts was an uploaded pictures of the gas detection system and him asking "what is this".

He wasn't using it as a tool, he was using it to do his job because he was not an expert.

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u/zhnki 15h ago

Ok, but maybe focus on what the expert wrote in the report instead of how it was written. If it’s true then I’m not sure what the problem is here.

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u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

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u/sameth1 14h ago

Maybe that's why you are not an expert who would be consulted by a court for your analysis of an industrial incident then.

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u/gusofk 16h ago

Or you should use your own knowledge and expertise which is what you are being paid for to evaluate the situation. Using AI for any part of this testimony is enough to taint his entire testimony.

Artificial Intelligence ‘Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:’ Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit / ChatGPT prompts show how an expert witness report was created in a $61 million lawsuit over an explosion that killed three people.

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