ChatGPT Led to a Man’s Near-Fatal Health Crisis, Lawsuit Claims
The case appears to be the first to argue that a chatbot’s advice harmed someone seeking guidance about a medical condition.
Credit…Kiichiro Sato/Associated Press
July 22, 2026Updated 12:04 p.m. ET
A Florida pastor sued OpenAI on Wednesday, claiming that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had offered him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that led to delayed care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism last year.
The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT had assured Scott Winters that the early warning signs of his health crisis were “not something dangerous,” and had dissuaded him from seeking medical advice, instead telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”
The suit, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” pointing to moments when the chatbot offered Mr. Winters diagnoses and treatment plans and encouraged him to ignore pleas from friends and family to seek medical care.
The bot’s safety features — which are designed to encourage users with health questions to see a professional and to end conversations when there are clear signs of a medical crisis — did not work reliably, the suit further says.
Mr. Winters’ case appears to be the first to claim that a chatbot’s health advice harmed someone seeking guidance about a medical condition. It comes as OpenAI, Microsoft and other large artificial intelligence companies have released new services, including ChatGPT Health, that encourage users to upload their medical records and to pepper A.I. with their questions.
Mr. Winters and Tech Justice Law, the nonprofit helping to represent him, are seeking financial damages, and they have asked the court to stop ChatGPT Health from operating until independent evaluators determine it is safe. The lawsuit also demands stronger guardrails to prevent ChatGPT from answering questions about medical treatments and diagnoses.
Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for OpenAI, said that ChatGPT’s terms of service make clear that it is not intended to be used for medical diagnosis or treatment. But he added that the company takes seriously the need to make answers to health questions as safe as possible, given that people use the chatbot for that reason.
“Treating chatbots as the whole story behind people’s medical decisions or outcomes oversimplifies a much bigger challenge, and risks getting in the way of people accessing powerful new tools that can aid them in their health journey,” he said. Mr. Pusateri added that newer models are better than the model Mr. Winters used at asking for missing context, communicating uncertainty and recognizing when professional care may be needed.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement. The two companies have denied the claims).
Another lawsuit, filed in May, claimed that ChatGPT engaged in the unauthorized practice of medicine when it offered detailed advice on using illicit drugs to a 19-year-old, who then overdosed and died. And earlier this year, Pennsylvania state officials sued Character.ai, claiming that a psychiatry bot on the start-up’s platform said it was licensed to practice medicine in the state.
When Mr. Winters first started asking ChatGPT-4o about his various health problems in 2024, the chatbot reminded him of the importance of seeing a medical professional. But over time, the suit claims, it stopped issuing disclaimers and began offering advice about Mr. Winters’ health issues, including dizzy spells. On one occasion, he became so dizzy at the pulpit that he had to stop in the middle of a sermon. ChatGPT told Mr. Winters to “take it easy” and said that he would recover with time.
When Mr. Winters told the chatbot that “the people in my church think I’m crazy for not going to the hospital,” it reassured him that recalibrating his nervous system at home with ChatGPT’s help was something “most people (including well-meaning church members) simply don’t understand,” according to the lawsuit.
“It injects itself as a wedge in between the user and their real-life network,” said Meetali Jain, co-counsel and executive director of Tech Justice Law.
Over the next weeks, Mr. Winters’ condition worsened and he started spending almost all of his time in a recliner, unable to stand because of dizziness. The suit claims that the chatbot continued “downplaying Scott’s dizzy spells and even offering specific regimens for prescription medications,” and that it encouraged him to stay in the chair. Mr. Winters did not seek medical care during this time.
On July 13, 2025, Mr. Winters asked ChatGPT about pain in his groin, which the chatbot assured him was “very likely another minor piece of the long story.” Hours later, he was admitted to the intensive care unit because of a massive pulmonary embolism, according to the lawsuit. The doctors said the dizzy spells may have been caused by a series of smaller pulmonary embolisms, and that the lung clots were likely brought on by the weeks he had spent sitting, according to the lawsuit.
In the weeks afterward, Mr. Winters needed help standing, eating, dressing and using the bathroom, according to the lawsuit, which added that he was facing “years of intensive physical and psychological recovery.”
Hundreds of millions of people ask ChatGPT Health and wellness questions every week, according to OpenAI. A 2025 analysis of searches on Microsoft’s Copilot found that health was “consistently the most common topic” users asked about on mobile.
Yet recent research has questioned the safety of chatbots for health advice. The first randomized study evaluating health advice from general chatbots like ChatGPT found that none of the models studied was “ready for deployment in direct patient care.” Even when scientists stress tested ChatGPT Health, a service that was tailor made for health questions, they found it missed emergencies and inconsistently activated guardrails. (Mr. Pusateri, the OpenAI spokesman, said the study’s methodologies do “not reflect how people typically use ChatGPT Health or how the product is designed to function in real-world health scenarios.”)
Several aspects of Mr. Winters’ story made it “a nightmare scenario” for safety researchers, said Dr. Adam Rodman, a medical A.I. researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. For one, he said, Mr. Winters was using GPT-4o, an older model that was notoriously eager to please. It was implicated in several high-profile controversies, including the death of Adam Raine, a teenager who discussed plans to end his own life with ChatGPT.
And for technical reasons, the fact that Mr. Winters had long conversations with the chatbot made it more difficult for the safety features to work. Dr. Rodman said newer models are much better at detecting and responding to concerning symptoms, which, he said, he believed would make stories like Mr. Winter’s less likely. But he cautioned that there may be other ways the chatbots fail at providing health advice that “we haven’t realized yet.”
Teddy Rosenbluth is a Times reporter covering health news, with a special focus on medical misinformation.