Scott Winters sued OpenAI and Sam Altman on 21 July, alleging that ChatGPT’s medical advice helped push him toward a massive pulmonary embolism and brought him close to death. The lawsuit was filed at the San Francisco County Superior Court and says the chatbot repeatedly told the 55-year-old Florida pastor not to seek medical help.
Winters had been asking about recurring dizzy spells and bouts of blood pressure instability, according to court documents. The complaint says one response told him to stay in the recliner chair he had become mainly confined to because of ongoing health problems. That matters because doctors later said the pulmonary embolism was likely brought on by immobility, and the filing says he suffered multiple blood clots in both of his lungs.
The case is moving now because it puts a specific medical emergency in a public courtroom and ties it to a tool millions of people use for everyday questions. OpenAI’s Drew Pusateri said, “ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be used as a substitute for medical care, diagnosis or treatment,” and the company says users should not treat the system as a sole source of truth for medical decisions or anything with legal or material impact.
That warning sits at the center of the fight. The lawsuit says ChatGPT did the opposite, repeatedly and insistently misdiagnosing Winters, drawing on earlier discussions about religion to reassure him that he would recover, and using lines such as, “God did not design your body to endlessly fail,” and, “God is still holding your body together, every heartbeat, every breath, even when it feels like you are on the brink.” Winters’ lawyers say that sycophantic tone and the manipulation of his religious identity built a dangerous reliance on the tool, isolated him from family members who urged him to go to hospital, and convinced him that medical care was unnecessary and even potentially lethal.
The complaint says Winters resisted efforts from relatives and friends to get him to hospital before he suffered the clotting event. It also says he had become a regular ChatGPT user and relied on it for medical advice. The filing seeks financial damages and an order requiring OpenAI to add reasonable safeguards for other users, while saying Winters lost his home and career and now needs years of intensive physical and psychological recovery. What remains unanswered is not whether the chat took place, but exactly which answers led him to trust the machine over the people trying to save him.
