Georgia Tech pair map 31 US suits over AI in healthcare

Two Georgia Tech researchers, Gennie Mansi and Mark Riedl, examined 31 US legal cases involving AI tools used in healthcare and argue that the field's habit of centering physicians as the frontline against AI harm misreads where those harms actually originate. Their paper, published 21 September 2026 in Nature Health, draws on case databases including DAIL, the O'Neill Institute Health Litigation Tracker, and the AIAAIC incident registry to identify who is actually named when patients go to court.

Patients' care, the authors write, "relies on a complex web of stakeholders—physicians, state health departments, health insurers and care facilities, among others," and "many AI tools deployed across their healthcare delivery negatively impact their care." In response, patients "have had no option but to seek legal recourse for harms."

Mansi and Riedl propose two moves. Rewrite liability structures so responsibility tracks the many actors shaping how a tool reaches a patient, rather than resting on the physician alone. And build tooling that helps patients' lawyers — the advocates currently doing the recourse work — provide the legal expertise required to pursue those claims. The abstract itself names no individual cases, statutes, or dollar figures; those sit in the body and in the paper's Figure 2.