With the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI has begun explicitly telling people to use its models for health advice. At the launch event, Altman welcomed on stage Felipe Millon, an OpenAI employee, and his wife, Carolina Millon, who had recently been diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer. Carolina spoke about asking ChatGPT for help with her diagnoses, saying that she had uploaded copies of her biopsy results to ChatGPT to translate medical jargon and asked the AI for help making decisions about things like whether or not to pursue radiation. The trio called it an empowering example of shrinking the knowledge gap between doctors and patients.
With this change in approach, OpenAI is wading into dangerous waters.
For one, it’s using evidence that doctors can benefit from AI as a clinical tool, as in the Kenya study, to suggest that people without any medical background should ask the AI model for advice about their own health. The problem is that lots of people might ask for this advice without ever running it by a doctor (and are less likely to do so now that the chatbot rarely prompts them to).
Indeed, two days before the launch of GPT-5, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a paper about a man who stopped eating salt and began ingesting dangerous amounts of bromide following a conversation with ChatGPT. He developed bromide poisoning—which largely disappeared in the US after the Food and Drug Administration began curbing the use of bromide in over-the-counter medications in the 1970s—and then nearly died, spending weeks in the hospital.
So what’s the point of all this? Essentially, it’s about accountability. When AI companies move from promising general intelligence to offering humanlike helpfulness in a specific field like health care, it raises a second, yet unanswered question about what will happen when mistakes are made. As things stand, there’s little indication tech companies will be made liable for the harm caused.
“When doctors give you harmful medical advice due to error or prejudicial bias, you can sue them for malpractice and get recompense,” says Damien Williams, an assistant professor of data science and philosophy at the University of North Carolina Charlotte.
“When ChatGPT gives you harmful medical advice because it’s been trained on prejudicial data, or because ‘hallucinations’ are inherent in the operations of the system, what’s your recourse?”
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.
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