(The Epoch Times)—Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Sept. 29 touted artificial intelligence (AI) for people making medical decisions at a summit sponsored by AI companies, drawing criticism from some doctors.
Kennedy, during an appearance at an event in Washington called the MAHA Summit, said he recently met with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Altman, he recalled, told him that “today it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or make a prescription without at least checking AI.”
Kennedy went on to reiterate the goal of giving Americans access to their medical records and described how AI could summarize lengthy records.
“You may have a medical record that’s a thousand pages long. You have six minutes with a doctor today. He’s not going to be able to review it, but the AI can. And … it can distill it,” Kennedy said. “It can give you a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country.”
Kennedy, a harsh critic of public health advice on masks, vaccines, and other matters during the COVID-19 pandemic, said one benefit of AI is that it could correct such advice from presumed experts.
“So it really has the capacity to dominate us to free us from medical tyranny,” he said.
AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, sponsored the summit in part. An OpenAI executive spoke during a session called “Building the AI Health Stack.”
The comments came as President Donald Trump and other top administration officials promote AI adoption. Trump, who has said it is important for the United States to remain ahead of adversaries such as China on AI, also signed a voluntary accord with AI executives earlier Tuesday.
AI provides answers to questions, including medical ones. Multiple lawsuits are pending in court over allegations that medical advice from AI led to catastrophic outcomes, including one from a Florida pastor against OpenAI, who alleged a chatbot instructed him not to seek medical attention when he developed symptoms such as severe dizziness.
Kennedy’s remarks prompted criticism from some doctors.
“AI is programmed to give you the current narrative pushed by ‘the experts’,” Dr. Jeffrey Dach, a Florida physician, wrote in a Sept. 30 post on X. “This means we get a rehash of the same lies and garbage we are being fed by the ‘experts’ and ‘authorities’ in government agencies captured by industry, and lies and garbage from the captured mass media. AI is merely a souped up search engine that hallucinates answers when it is lost.”
Dr. Joe Pierre, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, noted that he ran Kennedy’s comments by ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot.
“If his claim is AI is more reliable than MDs when giving people medical advice, the evidence doesn’t establish that,” ChatGPT responded. “In fact, some of the best real-world evidence points in the opposite direction.”
Kennedy noted downsides of AI, asking Vice President JD Vance, who appeared with him, to elaborate.
“Most of the downsides are all related to models that were literally trained to hack into your computer,” Vance said.
He said the best way to deal with the risks is to ensure companies are not shielded from product liability claims through regulations.
