Kennedy tells MAHA summit AI is 'better informed' than doctors

The Health and Human Services Secretary told an audience at the Waldorf Astoria on September 29 that artificial intelligence can give patients "a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered the line in a fireside chat with Vice President JD Vance at the MAHA Summit, an event whose sponsors, according to reporting relayed by the New York Times, included OpenAI and Anthropic. Kennedy said AI would "free us from medical tyranny" and promised that "by the time we leave, every American will have access on their cell phones to their own medical records."

He named the specific public-health guidance he expects the technology to contradict. "If somebody tells you, 'Masks work, trust the experts,' A.I. may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you, 'Social distancing works, trust the experts,' A.I. may correct that. And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, or you need to take it to protect your grandmother, A.I. may say it actually doesn't do that."

An OpenAI executive on stage went further. Felipe Millon, who heads the company's Government Go to Market division, told the audience that "it is medical malpractice not to get a second opinion from AI today." Kennedy said OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman had told him in a recent meeting that a diagnosis or a prescription issued without checking an AI model would now be malpractice, a position Altman would not have taken two years ago, according to Kennedy's account.

Vance opened with a joke: "I thought this was about weight loss and acid, not A.I." He then argued that "the experts are not the experts in the same way; they don't have the same control or monopoly on knowledge," and described someone who "used artificial intelligence to develop a new treatment model for his wife" during cancer treatment. Neither man cited a study, a model name, or a physician-comparison benchmark.