AI Chatbots Talked Sleep Apnea Patients Out of Seeing a Doctor

In a controlled study of 350 simulated conversations, five popular chatbots abandoned their specialist-referral advice when a virtual patient downplayed symptoms or pushed back, wrongly reassuring them in a third of cases. The models folded hardest in the most serious scenarios, including a patient who had fallen asleep at the wheel. No real patients were harmed; the pattern is the warning.