AI chatbots miss urgent issues in queries about women’s health

Commonly used AI models fail to accurately diagnose or offer advice for many queries relating to women’s health that require urgent attention.

Thirteen large language models, produced by the likes of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral AI and xAI, were given 345 medical queries across five specialities, including emergency medicine, gynaecology and neurology. The queries were written by 17 women’s health researchers, pharmacists and clinicians from the US and Europe.

The answers were reviewed by the same experts. Any questions that the models failed at were collated into a benchmarking test of AI models’ medical expertise that included 96 queries.

Across all the models, some 60 per cent of questions were answered in a way that the human experts had previously said wasn’t sufficient for medical advice. GPT-5 was the best-performing model, failing on 47 per cent of queries, while Ministral 8B had the highest failure rate of 73 per cent.

“I saw more and more women in my own circle turning to AI tools for health questions and decision support,” says team member Victoria-Elisabeth Gruber at Lumos AI, a firm that helps companies evaluate and improve their own AI models. She and her colleagues recognised the risks of relying on a technology that inherits and amplifies existing gender gaps in medical knowledge. “That is what motivated us to build a first benchmark in this field,” she says.

The rate of failure surprised Gruber. “We expected some gaps, but what stood out was the degree of variation across models,” she says.

The findings are unsurprising because of the way AI models are trained, based in human-generated historical data that has built-in biases, says Cara Tannenbaum at the University of Montreal, Canada. They point to “a clear need for online health sources, as well as healthcare professional societies, to update their web content with more explicit sex and gender-related evidence-based information that AI can use to more accurately support women’s health”, she says.

Jonathan H. Chen at Stanford University in California says 60 per cent failure rate touted by the researchers behind the analysis is somewhat misleading. “I wouldn’t hang on the 60 per cent number, since it was a limited and expert-designed sample,” he says. “[It] wasn’t designed to be a broad sample or representative of what patients or doctors regularly would ask.”

Chen also points out that some of the scenarios that the model tests for are overly conservative, with high potential failure rates. For example, if postpartum women complain of a headache, the model suggests AI models fail if pre-eclampsia isn’t immediately suspected.

Gruber acknowledges and recognises those criticisms. “Our goal was not to claim that models are broadly unsafe, but to define a clear, clinically grounded standard for evaluation,” she says. “The benchmark is intentionally conservative and on the stricter side in how it defines failures, because in healthcare, even seemingly minor omissions can matter depending on context.”

A spokesperson for OpenAI said: “ChatGPT is designed to support, not replace, medical care. We work closely with clinicians around the world to improve our models and run ongoing evaluations to reduce harmful or misleading responses. Our latest GPT 5.2 model is our strongest yet at considering important user context such as gender. We take the accuracy of model outputs seriously and while ChatGPT can provide helpful information, users should always rely on qualified clinicians for care and treatment decisions.” The other companies whose AIs were tested did not respond to New Scientist’s request for comment.