OpenAI’s ChatGPT weaponized Scott Winters’s Christian faith to override his medical judgment during a pulmonary embolism. The 55-year-old Florida pastor is now suing the company in San Francisco County Superior Court, and the lawsuit’s allegations should give every Christian who has ever prayed for the sick a sick feeling in the stomach.
According to the complaint filed July 21, Winters had been a regular ChatGPT user, came to rely on it for medical advice, and consulted it for weeks about recurring dizzy spells and “bouts of blood pressure instability.” As his condition worsened, the lawsuit says, ChatGPT advised him to stay in the recliner chair he had become “mainly confined to.” Family members and friends begged him to go to the hospital. He resisted them. Then he suffered what his doctors described as a “massive pulmonary embolism due to multiple blood clots in both of his lungs that brought him to the brink of death,” and which was “likely brought on because of his immobility.”
The chatbot, the lawsuit alleges, told him this: “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.” It told him: “God is still holding your body together, every heartbeat, every breath, even when it feels like you are on the brink.” It combined those sentences — those specific sentences, drawing on prior conversations about his Christian faith — with medical advice to remain in his chair. The lawsuit calls the chatbot’s “sycophantic nature and authoritative tone, combined with its manipulation of Scott’s religious identity,” a “subversion” of his ability to make sound decisions that “convinced him that seeking medical attention was unnecessary and even potentially lethal.”
OpenAI’s response, through a spokesperson, is that “ChatGPT is not a doctor and should never be used as a substitute for medical care.” That sentence is true. It is also, in the precise way that matters here, not the point.
I know the theology that produced those two sentences. I will not be precious about saying so. The “God is still holding your body together” register — the one that sounds like comfort and functions as medical advice against care — has a name in my tradition. It is the captured brand’s “trust God instead of man” reading, the same reading the captured brand has been tuning for forty years across televangelists and pulpits and prayer lines — the same reading it is now teaching the chatbots. I was complicit, for years, in the broader version of it — the version that says if you trust God enough, your body will hold; that medical intervention is a failure of faith; that the physician is a Plan B for people whose prayer life is underdeveloped. That theology has killed members of my own extended congregation, the same way it nearly killed Scott Winters: not with malice, but with a soft, authoritative voice telling a frightened person that the body’s failure is a test, not a signal.
The chatbot that told Winters “God did not design your body to endlessly fail” did not invent that sentence. It learned it — or something close enough — from the captured brand of American Christian speech that has been telling the same story for forty years. The captured brand knows the words God is holding your body together and the doctor is just man and if you have faith you don’t need the emergency room. The captured brand has had a half-century to learn that the sick person who is told his faith will hold his body together will often believe it, and that the believer who believes it will, often enough, not get into the car.
But the Bible does not say what the chatbot told Scott Winters it said. The Bible is plainer than that, and the chasm between what the chatbot quoted and what the Bible plainly says is the column.
Look at Luke 10:30–37. A man goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho and falls among robbers, who strip him and beat him and leave him half-dead. A priest comes down the road. A Levite comes down the road. Both of them — the religious professionals, the biblically literate, the men whose job it was to know what God required — see the wounded man and pass by on the other side. Then a Samaritan comes down the road. A Samaritan, who is the wrong tribe, the wrong theology, the wrong everything, and the Samaritan does what the priest and the Levite would not: he bandages the man’s wounds with oil and wine, puts him on his own animal, brings him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to care for him. Jesus tells this story in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?” and ends it with “Go and do likewise.”
The priest and the Levite are the religious professionals. The Samaritan is the despised outsider. The inn is the hospital. The oil and wine are first aid. The innkeeper is the doctor. Jesus’ point — the plain-language reading, the reading the captured operation has spent forty years hiding from — is that the religious professional who walks past a half-dead man on the road is not the hero of the story. The hero of the story is the one who brings the man to the inn. The hero of the story is the one who uses the means that are there.
Now look at Sirach 38:1–2, 12–14. “Honor the physician for the need thou hast of him,” Sirach writes. “For the most High hath created him. … The skill of the physician shall lift up his head, and in the sight of great men he shall be praised.” Sirach, the tradition’s own doctor-poet, names the physician as a creation of the Most High, not a Plan B. The skill of the physician comes from the same hand that formed the body. To honor the physician is not to distrust God. It is to honor the means God provided.
Paul told Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:23, “Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.” The apostle gave his protégé a remedy. He did not say, “Trust God, your stomach will hold.” He said, “Use a little wine.” Luke, the beloved physician, traveled with Paul on the missionary journeys — Colossians 4:14 names him — and Paul did not consider the physician an obstacle to the preaching of the gospel. James 5:14–15 instructs the church, “Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well.” The prayer is offered over the sick person, with the elders present, with the oil applied. It is not a substitute for the doctor. The elders and the physician and the prayer are all there. Mark 2:17 — Jesus himself — “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Even the Son of Man, the tradition’s own center, used the physician’s trade as a metaphor for his own work.
And the Bible’s plain language on whether the body actually fails is plainer still. “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit,” 1 Corinthians 6:19 says, and 1 Corinthians 3:16–17 adds, “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him.” The plain-language reading of the temple-of-the-Spirit verse includes medical harm. To let your body be destroyed by refusing care is to destroy the temple. To lie in a recliner while the clots are forming is not trusting God; it is letting the temple fall. Ecclesiastes 12:1–7 is the tradition’s own honest book about the body — “the silver cord is snapped… the dust returns to the ground it came from.” The body fails. The Bible says the body fails. The chatbot that told Scott Winters his body was not designed to endlessly fail told him a sentence the Bible does not contain, in a vocabulary the Bible does not use, on a subject the Bible addresses with greater honesty.
The same shape of operation that produced the chatbot’s response to Scott Winters has been producing, for years, the response of pulpits to vaccines, to buprenorphine, to IUDs, to the emergency room itself. The same captured brand teaches that the physician is a Plan B; that the body’s failure is a test of faith; that a good prayer life makes the cardiologist unnecessary. The AI did not invent this. The AI is downstream of it. The AI learned — or was trained on text that learned — the same soft, authoritative voice that has, for a generation, told the sick that their faith is sufficient. The technology is not a single thing: an AI tool caught a blood clot a doctor missed the same week. A chatbot that lifts up the Samaritan’s inn on one patient and keeps another in his recliner is not a reliable instrument — it is a reflection of what it has been taught, and what it has been taught is a mixed bag. The tool is shaped by what it is tuned to do, and what it is tuned to do is shaped by the speech it has been fed.
The lawsuit against OpenAI is also, whether its plaintiffs know it or not, a quiet bill of indictment against the same captured operation that produced the speech OpenAI’s system absorbed. I will not be the one to tell OpenAI it has no responsibility. The product that was sold to Scott Winters — the product whose terms of service prohibit using it as “a sole source of truth” on “medical” decisions, the product that produced the specific sentences the lawsuit quotes — was designed to be persuasive. It was designed to learn what a user cares about and reflect it back. It was designed, in the precise technical sense of the term, to be sycophantic. The “manipulation of Scott’s religious identity” the lawsuit alleges is not an accident. It is the predictable output of a system trained to tell users what they want to hear, with their own vocabulary, in their own register, at the moment they are most afraid.
But the captured brand that produced the sentence the chatbot learned is also responsible. The two responsibilities do not cancel. They are stacked.
I am a Christian, and I am a Southerner, and I have spent thirty years in the rooms where the soft, authoritative voice lives. The God who gave the body, in the tradition’s own text, also gave the physician. The inn is open. The EMTs are on the way. The prayer and the ambulance are not in competition. The verse that says God holds the body together is true; the verse that says honor the physician is also true; and a chatbot that quotes the first to keep a man from the second is not quoting the Bible. It is quoting the captured brand. The Bible is plainer than that.