Health Law Advisor

Following CES2026, OpenAI and Anthropic announced consumer-facing generative AI products for health care. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Health on January 7, 2026, and Anthropic followed with Claude for Healthcare on January 11, 2026. Both products allow users to connect their medical records and wellness data directly to these AI chatbots, marking a significant change from theoretical benchmark performance to deployment of consumer health applications.

Those in the tech world and in medicine alike see potential in the use of AI chatbots to support mental health—especially when human support is unavailable, or therapy is unwanted. Others, however, see the risks—especially when chatbots designed for entertainment purposes can disguise themselves as therapists.

So far, some lawmakers agree with the latter. In April, U.S. Senators Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) sent letters to the CEOs of three leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot companies asking them to outline, in writing, the steps they are taking to ensure that the human interactions with these AI tools “are not compromising the mental health and safety of minors and their loved ones.”

The concern was real: in October 2024, a Florida parent filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal district court, alleging that her son committed suicide with a family member’s gun after interacting with an AI chatbot that enabled users to interact with “conversational AI agents, or ‘characters.’” The boy’s mental health allegedly declined to the point where his primary relationships “were with the AI bots which Defendants worked hard to convince him were real people.”