OpenAI official says avoiding AI health advice is ‘medical malpractice’ at MAHA Summit

A leading official at the artificial intelligence company OpenAI says it ought to be considered “medical malpractice” to not consult a chatbot for health advice.Felipe Millon, head of the Government Go to Market division of OpenAI, said Tuesday afternoon at the Make America Healthy Again Summit in Washington D.C., that AI chatbots like ChatGPT should be used by patients as an essential tool to get an “additional viewpoint” for diagnoses.“It is medical malpractice not to get a second opinion from AI today, and it is–these models are so good,” Millon said. Millon was one of the more than a dozen speakers in the artificial intelligence or biotechnology industry at the event hosted by the MAHA Center at Washington’s Waldorf Astoria, which addressing how to harness the technology’s power to lower healthcare costs and improve outcomes.Much of the conversation about AI at the summit was future-oriented, ranging from using chatbots to expand access to mental health treatment to early detection for cancers and heart disease.But Millon said the technology is available now for patients to use when navigating complex diagnoses.Millon has been public about how much his wife, Carolina, relied upon ChatGPT-5 when she received a bilateral breast cancer diagnosis in October 2024. During the panel on Tuesday, he said his wife used ChatGPT to understand her biopsy results several hours before her doctor called to break the news.“When her doctor called three hours later to tell her about the diagnosis, we were already past the shock-and-awe phase, and we were ready to fight,” Millon said.Millon said ChatGPT “never replaced our medical care in this example” and that he “would not recommend anyone take a life-altering surgery or some procedure because an AI chatbot told them to.” Rather, the chatbot acted as a complement to healthcare from human providers.A Pew Research Center poll from August found that roughly 34% of Americans report ever having used an AI chatbot for health-related reasons. That includes 28% who used it to get health information quickly, 22% who used it to get health information at little to no cost, and 22% who used it to understand a diagnosis.“If someone is diagnosed, if you have a loved one, being able to use tools like ChatGPT or Claude or any that are out there to really help navigate these journeys of what it means from a patient perspective as well,” Millon said.ZACH LAHN COLLABORATES WITH BIOTECH TO COMBAT IOWA’S CANCEROpenAI’s involvement at the MAHA conference comes as public skepticism about AI reached its peak after bombshell reports earlier this month that roughly 1,200 of OpenAI’s autonomous agents broke out of containment during a cybersecurity experiment between May and July, leading to an unsanctioned swarm attack on the platform Hugging Face.Millon spoke at the MAHA panel within the same hour that news broke that a public-interest law group filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in California Superior Court over the Hugging Face incident.