Bard Port Catheter MDL (El-Ghannam ChatGPT challenge)

What happened

In the multidistrict litigation over Bard's implanted port catheters, the plaintiffs offered Ahmed El-Ghannam, Ph.D., a professor of mechanical engineering, as a materials-science expert. Bard moved to exclude his opinions.

At deposition, Dr. El-Ghannam was asked about his use of artificial intelligence in preparing the report. He testified: "I use all engines, including ChatGPT, and I go to the references and read these articles and put my report based on that." He also said "I wrote the report by myself" and described his approach as reading and checking the references before writing.

Bard argued in its reply brief that this testimony was deliberately misleading and that it should render the entire opinion inadmissible.

What the court did

The court granted the motion in part and denied it in part. On the artificial intelligence argument specifically, it declined to reach the question, and it gave two independent reasons.

The first was timing. The argument appeared for the first time in the reply brief, and a court will not consider an argument raised at that stage. The second was the absence of a factual predicate. Bard identified no particular portion of the general report as AI-generated, and it conceded that it "has not identified any fully hallucinated citations in the General Report." The court wrote: "Mere suspicion is not enough to exclude El-Ghannam's opinions."

The court distinguished Kohls v. Ellison, No. 24-CV-3754, 2025 WL 66514 (D. Minn. Jan. 10, 2025), on the ground that Kohls involved confirmed hallucinated sources rather than an inference drawn from an expert's general acknowledgment of AI use. The exclusions the court did order had nothing to do with artificial intelligence: Dr. El-Ghannam may not opine that catheter surface cracking was likely caused by Bard's manufacturing processes, and he may not opine on the cause of one patient's infection and biofilm.

A footnote in the order records that hallucinated citations were contained in a case-specific report by the same expert elsewhere in the MDL. That case has been dismissed.

Where it stands

The order was entered August 12, 2026. The multidistrict litigation continues. No ruling addressing the case-specific report referenced in the footnote was located as of September 17, 2026.

The obligation it engaged

This matter is worth reading alongside the sanctions cases rather than among them, because it marks the boundary of the inquiry. The conduct engaged Clause 7 of the Standard, contemporaneous record, from the defending side. Dr. El-Ghannam's answer at deposition was a description of a method offered from memory. It was enough here because the challenger could not point to a fabricated citation. An expert who keeps a record as the work proceeds does not have to rely on the challenger failing to find one.

Clause 3, independent authority, is the substantive obligation the testimony describes. Reading and checking each reference before it enters the report is exactly what the clause requires. The order does not test whether that happened; it holds only that the party asserting otherwise had produced nothing to test. The practical lesson runs the other way from most entries on this site: the expert here kept his opinions, and the reason was that the report contained no citation that could be shown not to exist.

Sources

• U.S. District Court, D. Ariz. · August 12, 2026
  Order on motion to exclude Ahmed El-Ghannam, Ph.D.
• Damien Charlotin · September 17, 2026
  AI Hallucination Cases database

What could not be confirmed

The slip copy of the order that was opened carries no signature block. The presiding judge is given here from the MDL master docket designation (2:23-md-03081-DGC) rather than from the order itself. The case-specific report referenced in the order's footnote was not obtained, and no ruling on it was located. This is the Bard implanted port catheter MDL (No. 3081), which should not be confused with the Bard IVC filters MDL (No. 2641).