Safety, Accuracy, Empathy, Information Quality, and Readability of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Health Advice Generated by 6 Large Language Models: Cross-Sectional Comparative Evaluation Study

Background: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for health information, but chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)-related questions often involve safety-sensitive decisions, including treatment escalation, oxygen therapy, and exacerbation management. Because generative outputs may vary across repeated prompts, response stability is also relevant to comparative evaluation. Objective: This study aims to compare 6 public-facing LLM chatbots in answering COPD-related public health questions acr…