Man Obliterated When Court Obtains His ChatGPT Transcripts
We would simply never recover.
Published Aug 18, 2026 8:59 AM EDT
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Normally, you’d imagine huge megacorporations having a personal army of the best lawyers in the world who can spin anything in their favor. You’d certainly think that would be the case for 3M, the industrial conglomerate that got away with permanently poisoning our planet with “forever chemicals.”
But nobody’s perfect all the time. In a lawsuit about who’s liable for a Houston explosion that killed three people, an “expert witness” that 3M’s legal team hired turned out to be a total hack who used AI to put together his entire report defending the company, 404 Media reports.
The opposing legal team suspected AI usage during the discovery phase, and demanded to see the expert witness’ ChatGPT logs. The judge obliged, and 3M’s legal team were forced to turn over 350 pages of his activity on the AI platform — which also, amazingly, contained public links to his full conversations.
The resulting reckoning was brutal. The logs showed that the man, Josh Autenrieth of Knighthawk Engineering, asked ChatGPT to “create an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,” and that the resulting document should “show how 3M is 0 percent at fault” for the lethal explosion at Watson Grinding, which also destroyed hundreds at homes.
“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,” one prompt began.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Autenrieth was asking ChatGPT to do his job for him. He attached hundreds of court records and asked the AI to read all of them and create a defense of 3M that showed that Watson Grinding was responsible for the explosion, the logs showed.
The resulting 30 page report that the AI created stated that, “From a technical and standard-of-care standpoint, 3M is 0 percent responsible for the January 24, 2020 explosion.” (This amateurish line was later removed because when Autenrieth asked ChatGPT to go over its own work, it stated that “‘0 percent responsible’ is an easy target” for a lawyer to dismantle.)
Autetrith, purportedly an expert with twenty years of experience in gas detection, also uploaded a picture of a gas detector and asked ChatGPT, “what am I looking at?”
According to Will Moye, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, that gas detector asked about is the “subject of the whole case.”
“This expert relied on AI not as an assistive device, but exclusively relied on ChatGPT to form his opinions and write his report,” Moye told 404. “He acknowledged [at trial] the prompts he put in were biased toward 3M to help 3M win the case… it’s really egregious.”
From an AI in law point of view, one interesting upshot of the case is that ChatGPT transcripts can now be exposed in discovery or during depositions, the reporting noted — which is gonna cause all sorts of OPSEC headaches in the legal world.
“Every lawyer needs to make sure their own experts aren’t generating work product in a way that’s insincere, and then knowing you can subpoena the prompts,” Moye added. “I’ve got lawyers all over the place saying, 1) ‘Holy shit, man. How did you get the prompts?,’ and 2) ‘How many cases do I have where this is happening to us?’”
More on AI: Furious Judge Cancels Entire Trial After Finding Out Lawyers on Both Sides Used AI
Frank Landymore
Contributing Writer
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
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