WASHINGTON — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared at a MAHA summit that artificial intelligence would free Americans from “medical tyranny” by allowing them to “fact check their own medical advice.” “We're never ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us: 'Trust the experts,'” Kennedy told the invite-only audience.

The MAHA Summit was organized by MAHA Center Inc. Tony Lyons runs the MAHA Center, MAHA PAC, and several related groups. OpenAI and Anthropic were sponsors of the MAHA Summit. More than a dozen other companies with pending business before the U.S. government also sponsored the event. Sponsors of the MAHA Summit paid up to $300,000.

Many MAHA Summit sponsors received speaking slots on panels that included administration health officials such as CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz. Robert Malone, a vaccine researcher who recently served on a federal vaccine panel under Kennedy, criticized the arrangement. “It was classic pay-to-play,” Malone said.

“There was no representation of people that have been at the core of MAHA and its creation, whether it be physicians or patients or patient advocates,” Malone said.

Zeke Emanuel, a cancer specialist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, challenged the health secretary's understanding of the technology. “He obviously doesn't understand how AI works,” Emanuel said. He explained that current models aggregate existing medical literature and case studies, meaning users receive established medical expertise rather than independent verification.

“He wants AI to mimic what he says,” Emanuel said. “But that's not what good AI is going to do.” HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard responded that Emanuel was describing “one narrow use” of AI technology. She stated that Kennedy wants to give Americans more control of their health data by using AI “to help them understand it, interrogate it, compare it with the evidence, and make better decisions with their doctors.” Hilliard added that the technology will help doctors work faster, giving them “more time to treat and care for patients.”

The push for AI integration occurs against a backdrop of shifting federal oversight. President Donald Trump revoked a Biden administration executive order on AI oversight shortly after returning to the White House. The Trump administration took more than 16 months to replace the revoked AI oversight executive order with its own order.

Medicare officials have been in discussions with several medical chatbot companies, including one behind a Utah program that provides AI-enabled refills of prescriptions. OpenAI and Anthropic offer health-focused chatbots that can analyze users' medical records and answer healthcare questions. The AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic are trained on thousands of peer-reviewed medical papers and professional guidelines and incorporate feedback from doctors. Moms Across America operates campaigns warning against pollution, water use, and electricity costs associated with data center construction. Moms Across America was founded by Zen Honeycutt, a former staffer for Kennedy's presidential campaign.

What's New

Research titled “Secretary Spellings Addresses Higher Education Summit” was published in PsycEXTRA Dataset. The MAHA Center Inc. is one of a number of nongovernment groups run by Kennedy associates that are dedicated to promoting his agenda, alongside the MAHA Institute, a think tank, and MAHA PAC, a political fundraising operation.