The feature is a "data moat play disguised as a feature launch." By connecting to EHRs and wellness apps, OpenAI moves beyond ephemeral chats to build a persistent, indexed health profile for each user. This creates immense switching costs and a personalized model that competitors like Google and Meta cannot easily replicate with their existing data graphs.
The enormous private capital available to AI leaders, shown by Anthropic's $10B and xAI's $20B rounds, reduces the urgency to go public. This nearly unlimited appetite from private markets allows these companies to continue their aggressive growth and infrastructure build-outs without the regulatory scrutiny and quarterly pressures of being a public company.
The creation of ChatGPT Health was not a proactive pivot but a direct response to massive, organic user behavior. OpenAI discovered that 1 in 4 weekly active users—over 200 million people globally—were already using the general purpose tool for health queries, validating the immense market demand before a single line of dedicated code was written.
While Apple faltered with AI attrition and delayed features, Google executed a rigorous AI-first strategy throughout 2024 and 2025. This involved restructuring its AI organization and releasing groundbreaking models, directly leading to a stock surge that allowed it to overtake Apple's market capitalization for the first time since 2019.
LM Arena's $1.7B valuation stems from its innovative flywheel: it attracts millions of users to a simple "pick your favorite AI" game, generating data that becomes the industry's most trusted leaderboard. This forces major AI labs to pay for evaluations, turning a user engagement loop into a powerful marketing and revenue engine.
The most anticipated capability of ChatGPT Health is not just answering questions, but its ability to perform cross-platform analysis that is currently difficult. Users are most excited to ask how daily steps from Apple Health correlate with sleep from Whoop, or how blood test results connect to heart rate data, uncovering previously inaccessible personal health insights.