No, ChatGPT hasn’t added a ban on giving legal and health advice

OpenAI says ChatGPT’s behavior “remains unchanged” after reports across social media falsely claimed that new s updates to its usage policy prevent the chatbot from offering legal and medical advice. Karan Singhal, OpenAI’s head of health AI, writes on X that the claims are “not true.” 

“ChatGPT has never been a substitute for professional advice, but it will continue to be a great resource to help people understand legal and health information,” Singhal says, replying to a now-deleted post from the betting platform Kalshi that had claimed “JUST IN: ChatGPT will no longer provide health or legal advice.”

According to Singhal, the inclusion of policies surrounding legal and medical advice “is not a new change to our terms.”

The new policy update on October 29th has a list of things you can’t use ChatGPT for, and one of them is “provision of tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional.”

That remains similar to OpenAI’s previous ChatGPT usage policy, which said users shouldn’t perform activities that “may significantly impair the safety, wellbeing, or rights of others,” including “providing tailored legal, medical/health, or financial advice without review by a qualified professional and disclosure of the use of AI assistance and its potential limitations.” 

OpenAI previously had three separate policies, including a “universal” one, as well as ones for ChatGPT and API usage. With the new update, the company has one unified list of rules that its changelog says “reflect a universal set of policies across OpenAI products and services,” but the rules are still the same.