OpenAI Says Over 40 Million Users Have Asked ChatGPT Healthcare Questions: Report

ChatGPT is reportedly drawing up huge numbers of healthcare related questions on OpenAI’s website. The San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) giant said over 40 million users worldwide have sent the AI chatbot questions about healthcare and medical information, according to the report. Much of these messages are said to be from the poor rural communities, and one of the most popular topics is health insurance. But in August 2025, when the company released the GPT-5 AI model, it was a big focus on health-related performance.

OpenAI Reportedly Claims High Volume of Healthcare Queries

The AI giant also shared a number of user data metrics with Axios on how people interact with the chatbot when it comes to healthcare and medical questions. Unfortunately, 40 million healthcare messages abovementioned are the north of five percent in all ChatGPT messages worldwide. The company also reportedly revealed that between 1 and 2 s were among the most prominent. 6 and 1? A week of 9 million a-week messages are asking for advice on health insurance, with the main questions about plan comparison, claims and billing as well as coverage.

Other than this the report also stated that as many of 6,00,000 healthcare-related questions are asked per week by users living in rural communities and seven out of 10 conversations occur at a time when clinics generally close.

It also shared results from a December 2025 survey by OpenAI with the publication. In the US, 1,042 adults were asked to answer a number of user behaviour questions that it asked for several users. In the report, 55 percent of those who answered said they use ChatGPT to check or explore physical symptoms they’re facing; 48 percent say chatbot is used to understand medical terms and instructions. And another 44 per cent said they used AI to study treatment options.

Two things are immediately highlighted in the data, which is a . Firstly, the public domain lack of access to healthcare and medical information is not accessible. While Google has been a popular source for people to search health data (unless users know the right keywords to look up and have knowledge of deciphering the technical medical language) it is not readily available information.

Second is the availability of doctors and hospitals. In many cases, especially those in areas with limited healthcare infrastructure, most people do not visit doctors or health care professionals for minor ailments and resort to home remedies. Using the data from OpenAI, it shows how AI is filling both of these gaps with informative and science-backed knowledge.

Yet, there are concerns over the ”. The fact that AI hallucination is still a problem in 2026, the reliability of information shared by schatbot remains an important question as it has been one of the most difficult questions ever asked. The window of error and the reliance on a large user base can quickly become disaster recipe if ChatGPT starts spreading misinformation, while OpenAI told the publication that it is “working towards improving the healthcare-related responses continuously”.