A chatbot beat 911 dispatchers at coaching CPR — and its creators want everyone to use it

When someone collapses, the outcome usually depends on instructions provided by an emergency dispatcher. ChatCPR outperformed human guidance on every measure.

Roughly 350,000 Americans suffer an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest each year. Tragically, only about 10% survive. One reason is that just 2% of the population is trained in CPR, so when someone collapses on a sidewalk or in a living room, what happens next usually comes down to a 911 dispatcher talking a panicked stranger through chest compressions. Researchers at UC San Diego, working with the University of Pittsburgh and Johns Hopkins, have built an AI tool designed to do that job. In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, it outperformed human dispatchers on every measure.

The tool, called ChatCPR, was tested against recordings of real 911 calls in which dispatchers had already coached bystanders through resuscitation. On basic steps — hand placement, compression rate, depth — dispatchers hit 85% of the guideline checklist. ChatCPR hit 100%. On the finer points that most affect survival, like allowing the chest to fully recoil between compressions, the gap widened to 36 percentage points: 63% for dispatchers, 99% for the AI. The team had first benchmarked off-the-shelf models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, which averaged 90% on the basics but only 70% on the advanced steps.

"In cardiac arrest, good is not good enough," said coauthor Cameron Dezfulian, an intensivist at Baylor College of Medicine. "Missing 10 to 30% of steps can be the difference between life and death." ChatCPR was engineered to close those gaps, drawing on dispatcher training materials and current CPR guidelines, and the researchers have released it as open source. They are careful to position it as a support for dispatchers and first responders, not a replacement, and acknowledge that real-world testing, safeguards and legal questions still need to be worked out.

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Many medical AI systems promise to revolutionize diagnostics or drug discovery years from now. ChatCPR is a narrower bet: that a chatbot can be useful in the next five minutes, when a stranger is kneeling over someone who has stopped breathing. Instead of asking hospitals and other healthcare providers to overhaul their workflows or trust an algorithm with consequential decisions, this solution slots into phone calls that are already happening and "simply" raises the quality of the instructions being given. For organizations trying to figure out where AI actually earns its keep, that's a useful reference point.