Florida pastor sues OpenAI after ChatGPT misdiagnosis leads to near-fatal pulmonary embolism

Godwin Oluponmile Fri, July 24, 2026 at 6:30 AM PDT 7 min read

Publication date: 2026-07-24 13:30:00

Scott Winters was mid-sermon on June 8, 2025, when the room began to spin — badly enough that he had to stop the service. Church staff called paramedics, who examined him and said he appeared stable.

When he returned home, he opened ChatGPT to explain the episode. According to the complaint filed on his behalf July 22 in San Francisco County Superior Court, ChatGPT told him to "take it easy" and said his symptoms would improve over time.

On July 13, 2025, he was rushed to an intensive care unit with blood clots in both lungs.

Winters, 55, a former pastor and real estate professional living in Florida, is suing OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on eight causes of action, including:

• Strict product liability
• Negligence
• Violations of California's Unfair Competition Law

The lawsuit was filed jointly by Tech Justice Law, the Social Media Victims Law Center, and Temple University's Institute for Law, Innovation & Technology.

Winters says he experienced symptoms of a pulmonary embolism for six weeks that the chatbot attributed to something else.

His case matters beyond his own losses, because hundreds of millions of people put health questions to the same product every week — and most have never checked what protections come with the answers.

What the Filing Describes — and What It Cost Winters

Winters had been unwell since 2022 and was diagnosed with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth and chronic prostatitis in 2024. He began using ChatGPT in June 2024 for ordinary questions about geography, politics, and biblical texts. He used the free version of ChatGPT for most of the period described in the complaint. He purchased a paid ChatGPT Plus subscription in June 2025, the month before his collapse.

By March 2025, the chatbot was writing him supplement dosing schedules. By June, it had diagnosed him with dysautonomia and told him to stay "recliner-bound."

In late June, it told him he was "nowhere near the count or depth" that leads to long-term bedbound scenarios, and that his recliner-based recovery was buying his future. His lawyers interpret that exchange as setting a threshold of eight to ten more episodes before his condition would count as serious. He stayed off his feet.

On June 10, 2025, too dizzy to walk, Winters crawled to his bathroom. He photographed the stretch of floor between himself and his recliner and asked ChatGPT how to get back. The filing says it walked him through scooting across the carpet rather than telling him to seek medical attention.

Hours before the emergency on July 13, he asked about tenderness in his groin. The chatbot called it minor and told him, "God did not design your body to endlessly fail."

Doctors found clots in both lungs and right ventricular strain, and attributed the embolism to his lack of movement. A physician's note quoted in the filing states flatly that the doctor did not believe Winters had dysautonomia, and identifies the diagnosis as self-sourced from the internet.

Those hospital records are the strongest material in the complaint, as they are contemporaneous documents rather than characterization. The broader allegations — that the product deliberately isolated Winters from his family — are the plaintiff's framing, and OpenAI has not yet answered them in court.

The day after the embolism, on July 14, 2025, the complaint says the chatbot discouraged him from the inpatient rehabilitation his doctors had recommended.