ChatGPT is expanding its presence in the health care realm. OpenAI said Wednesday that its popular AI chatbot will begin rolling out ChatGPT Health, a new tab dedicated to addressing all your medical inquiries. The goal of this new tab is to centralize all your medical records and provide a private area for your wellness issues. 

Looking for answers about a plethora of health issues is a top use for the chatbot. According to OpenAI, "hundreds of millions of people" sign in to ChatGPT every week to ask a variety of health and wellness questions. Additionally, ChatGPT Health (currently in beta testing) will encourage you to connect any wellness apps you also use, such as Apple Health and MyFitnessPal, resulting in a more connected experience with more information about you to draw from.

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What this means for your privacy

Online privacy, especially in the age of AI, is a significant concern, and this announcement raises a range of questions regarding how your personal health data will be used and the safeguards that will be implemented to keep sensitive information secure -- especially with the proliferation of data breaches and data brokers.

"The US doesn't have a general-purpose privacy law, and HIPAA only protects data held by certain people like health care providers and insurance companies," Andrew Crawford, senior counsel for privacy and data at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in an emailed statement. 

He continued: "The recent announcement by OpenAI introducing ChatGPT Health means that a number of companies not bound by HIPAA's privacy protections will be collecting, sharing and using people's health data. And since it's up to each company to set the rules for how health data is collected, used, shared and stored, inadequate data protections and policies can put sensitive health information in real danger."

OpenAI says the new tab will have a separate chat history and a memory feature that can keep your health chat history separate from the rest of your ChatGPT usage. 

Further protections, such as encryption and multifactor authentication, will defend your data and keep it secure, the company says. Health conversations won't be used to train the chatbot, according to the company.

How the tab will work in theory

Privacy issues aside, another concern is how people intend to use ChatGPT Health. OpenAI's blog post states the service "is not intended for diagnosis or treatment."

The slope is slippery here. In August 2025, a man was hospitalized after allegedly being advised by the AI chatbot to replace salt in his diet with sodium bromide. There are other examples of AI providing incorrect and potentially harmful advice to individuals, leading to hospitalization. 

OpenAI's announcement also doesn't touch on mental health concerns, but a blog post from October 2025 says the company is working to strengthen its responses in sensitive conversations. Whether these mental health guardrails will be enough to keep people safe remains to be seen.

ChatGPT Health is intended to be used for fitness, nutrition and medical information, according to OpenAI. It's also not aiming to replace mental health care, and the chatbot has been trained to direct people asking for mental health help to real-world resources, like crisis hotlines.

OpenAI says that after working with more than 170 mental health experts, it has improved ChatGPT's ability to respond to mental health distress and can de-escalate such conversations. It also says its GPT-5 model hallucinates up to eight times less often than its earlier models, according to some benchmarking tests.

If you're interested in ChatGPT Health, you can join a waitlist, as the tab isn't yet live.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)