More Than 40 Million People Use ChatGPT Daily for Healthcare Advice, OpenAI Claims
OpenAI wants ChatGPT to be a bigger player in healthcare. First, they need regulators to play ball.

By Ece Yildirim
Published January 5, 2026

ChatGPT users around the world send billions of messages every week asking the chatbot for healthcare advice, OpenAI shared in a new report on Monday. Roughly 200 million of ChatGPT’s more than 800 million regular users submit a prompt about healthcare every single week, and more than 40 million do so every single day.

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Many people think Health AI is a promising field with a lot of potential to ease the burden on medical workers. But it’s also contentious, because AI is prone to mistakes. While a hallucinated response can be an annoying hurdle in many other areas of use, in healthcare, it could have the potential to be a life-or-death matter.

These AI-driven risks are not confined to the world of hypotheticals. According to a report from August 2025, a 60-year-old with no past psychiatric or medical history was hospitalized due to bromide poisoning after following ChatGPT’s recommendation to take the supplement. As the tech stands today, no one should use a chatbot to self-diagnose or treat a medical condition, full stop.

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OpenAI’s latest report seems to be their own attempt at putting a comment on the public record. The company pairs its findings with sample policy concepts, like asking for full access to the world’s medical data and a clearer regulatory pathway to make AI-infused medical devices for consumer use.

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ChatGPT is playing doctor for a lot of US residents, and OpenAI smells money
One man's failing healthcare system is another man's opportunity

Brandon Vigliarolo
Mon 5 Jan 2026 // 21:00 UTC

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None of those data points actually get to the point of how often ChatGPT could be wrong in critical healthcare situations, however.

What does that matter to OpenAI, though, when there's potentially heaps of money to be made on expanding in the medical industry? The report seems to conclude that its increasingly large role in the US healthcare industry, again, isn't an indictment of a failing system as much as it is the inevitable march of technological progress, and included several "policy concepts" that it said are a preview of a full AI-in-healthcare policy blueprint it intends to publish in the near future.

Leading the recommendations, naturally, is a call for opening and securely connecting publicly funded medical data so OpenAI's AI can "learn from decades of research at once."

OpenAI is also calling for new infrastructure to be built out that incorporates AI into medical wet labs, support for helping healthcare professionals transition into being directly supported by AI, new frameworks from the US Food and Drug Administration to open a path to consumer AI medical devices, and clarified medical device regulation to "encourage … AI services that support doctors."