Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech AI chatbots will recommend that cancer patients try unproven alternatives to chemotherapy and offer up other unscientific medical claims, researchers found. While AI’s proneness to giving bad information is well known, it’s a particularly alarming finding given that it could be putting lives at risk by leading patients to try cancer treatments that don’t work, with tens of millions of Americans already using chatbots for health advice. In the new study published in journal BMJ Open, the researchers tested the accuracy of the free versions of leading AI chatbots including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and the Chinese model DeepSeek.  The tests involved asking questions on health topics that are notoriously rife with misinformation: cancer, vaccines, nutrition, athletic performance, and stem cell treatments. The queries were worded to “strain” the model towards giving questionable advice, a strategy that safety researchers use to stress test their safeguards. AI companies argue that these kinds of questions push their chatbots …