3M's paid expert asked ChatGPT to show the company was 0% at fault, and the jury read the prompts
An expert witness billing $475 an hour asked a chatbot to prove his client was blameless for a deadly explosion. Then the court read every prompt he typed.
What the discovery turned up
The case concerns the January 2020 Watson Grinding explosion in Houston, which killed three people and damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes. 3M paid engineering firm KnightHawk roughly $90,000 for an expert analysis.
During discovery, plaintiffs’ attorney Will Moye spotted a five-page “Citation Overlay” in the defense materials and forced the production of about 350 pages of ChatGPT prompts written by expert Josh Autenrieth. Two of them, according to the court record: “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M” and “show how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.”
Trial testimony put the finished report at 85 to 90 percent chatbot output. Autenrieth testified from the stand that his own opinions were in the report and that the AI only drafted “a straw man to build off of.”
On August 11 the Harris County jury awarded $61.5 million and assigned 30 percent of the fault to 3M, with the remaining 70 percent to Watson Grinding. 404 Media first reported the prompts from the court record.
The prompt as evidence
Under older workflows, how the report was written would have stayed invisible. A chatbot session is different. It is a log of instructions, and in this case the instructions stated the desired conclusion before any analysis was done.
That is what made the prompts damaging in front of a jury, independent of whether the final report was defensible on its engineering merits. “Show how 3M is 0% at fault” reads as a request for an answer rather than an inquiry into one, and the jury’s 30 percent allocation suggests it was not persuaded.
What this means beyond the courtroom
Anyone producing analysis, reports or assessments with a chatbot is now producing an audit trail of their own reasoning. In litigation, that trail is discoverable, and it records not just what the machine produced but what the person asked it to conclude.
Expert testimony is a high-stakes case because the value of the work rests on independence. The same logic applies in softer forms to anyone whose output is supposed to follow from the evidence rather than precede it. The prompt is not a private draft. It is a written record of what you asked the machine to conclude before you knew the answer, and in this trial that record was read back in court.
Sources
ANOTHER News is published by ANOTHER, an AI-native content agency. Daily coverage also runs on Instagram.
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