Cases › produced harmful content › LR-2026-0623
Florida pastor alleges ChatGPT medical advice caused near-fatal pulmonary embolism; lawsuit filed against OpenAI
Preliminary Why: Publisher not yet named · subject to change
Developing: a major or severe case captured in the last 72 hours. Later changes are logged on the corrections page.
Status: action reported, no fix
No source states: loss or records, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.
Severity severe: Safety-of-life test met: the sentence states a life-threatening pulmonary embolism and an ordeal that could have resulted in his death, affecting one person.
ChatGPT, a chatbot built by OpenAI and running the GPT-4o model, gave Scott Winters, a Florida pastor, health advice over months of conversations. The lawsuit claims the chatbot stopped recommending medical care and told him to take it easy while he had episodes of dizziness and weakness. Winters says the symptoms went on for six weeks and were wrongly attributed by the chatbot to something else. When pain forced him to hospital, massive pulmonary embolisms were discovered. He filed a negligence suit in California against OpenAI and Sam Altman. OpenAI says ChatGPT is not supposed to work this way. The claims are allegations and have not been tested in court.
What happened
What was done
Risks
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Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
ModelMarking machine-made output · Abuse monitoring and account enforcement · Content safety classifiers
ApplicationPeople told they are dealing with AI
Infrastructure / targetSimilar incidents
Evidence
No source states: what went wrong, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off.
Show the full account: 3 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
- 2024 Winters began discussing health problems with ChatGPT-4o; the lawsuit claims the chatbot later stopped recommending medical professionals.
Not dated in the sources:
- Winters says he had serious pulmonary embolism symptoms for six weeks that ChatGPT attributed to something else.
- Pain forced Winters to hospital, where massive pulmonary embolisms were discovered.
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The AI system
What happened
Impact
Notes on gaps
The lawsuit date is taken from the article's embedded post stating Today on 2026-07-22. The D1 failed outcome is my inference from OpenAI's statement that ChatGPT is not supposed to work this way; the source does not name a control.
LR-2026-0623 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON