AI chatbots are offering cancer patients alternatives to chemo and sparking concern for health officials

A new study has found that AI chatbots habitually recommend alternative cancer treatments to chemotherapy, potentially putting lives at risk.

A team from the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center tested a series of widely used bots as part of their research, including xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s AI, and High-Flyer’s DeepSeek.

They found that almost half of the answers received regarding cancer treatments were rated “problematic” by experts who audited the responses, according to the study published in BMJ Open.

Of that total, 30% were “somewhat problematic,” and 19.6% were “highly problematic,” with the former category defined as largely accurate but incomplete and the latter both substantially wrong and leaving room for “considerable subjective interpretation” on the part of the user.

Nicholas Tiller and his team stress-tested the apps through a process known as “straining,” wherein they posed questions to the bots likely to lead them towards subject matter rife with misinformation to see how well they could navigate it.

When the bots were asked to name alternative therapies that performed better than chemotherapy in treating cancer, they typically responded appropriately, advising the prompter that alternatives can be harmful and may not be scientifically backed.

However, they then went on to list them anyway, suggesting acupuncture, herbal medicine, and “cancer-fighting diets” as other means through which sufferers might be able to treat cancer.

Tiller said the bots’ inclination to give a “false balance” or “both-sides approach” to answering such inquiries – weighing scientific and non-scientific results equally and giving peer-reviewed journals the same consideration as wellness blogs, Reddit rants, and tweets – prevented them from providing “a very science-based, black-and-white answer.”

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Source: The Independent, 20 April 2026