Health Secretary Robert J. Kennedy Jr. told a Washington audience on Tuesday that AI could soon give patients “a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country,” part of a wide-ranging pitch for AI in medicine at the Make America Healthy Again Summit.
Politico reports that the conference was held at the Waldorf Astoria and sponsored by companies including Walmart, the cancer-screening firm Grail, and AI kingpins Anthropic and OpenAI. Kennedy sat down with Vice President JD Vance for an onstage “fireside chat,” where he said AI would “free us from medical tyranny.” He told the audience that during a recent visit to his office, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, said it would be “malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking AI”
Kennedy then suggested AI could undercut official public health guidance that may not have the health of all Americans as its top priority. “One of the things that is going to change is that we’re never ever again going to be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us, ‘Trust the experts,’” he said. He gave examples: “If somebody tells you, ‘Masks work, trust the experts,’ AI may tell you otherwise,” and “If somebody tells you, ‘Social distancing works, trust the experts,’ AI 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, AI may say it actually doesn’t do that.”
Vance seemed to poke fun at where the conversation had gone. “I guess I’m in the wrong summit. I thought this was about weight loss and acid, not A.I.,” he said.
The summit came five weeks before the midterm elections and featured other administration officials, including Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, and Medicare and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz. Not everyone in the movement embraced the corporate tilt. Dr. Robert Malone, who briefly served as vice chair of a vaccine advisory committee Kennedy appointed before resigning in March after a judge found he and others lacked the necessary qualifications, dismissed the event bluntly: “It’s all a grift.”
In the New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall explains the central challenge to Kennedy’s assertion that AI will serve as a voice of dissent against extreme leftist positions on health. He documents in the book how bias enters AI both from training materials and in the guardrails AI companies build into their models.
For example, Code Red explains how bias is baked into educational AI platforms already used in schools:
In CODE RED, Hall points to Khan Academy’s Khanmigo as an example of how bias operates even in well-designed educational AI. In his book Brave New Words, Salman Khan described how Khanmigo handled the Second Amendment using the Socratic method, “challenging the student in a productive way—one that showed much less bias than the average classroom and actually encouraged the student to think!” But Khan then proudly showcased the same AI “dismantling” skepticism about global warming, praising it for having “successfully dismantled any false information while supporting science-backed arguments” and even generating lesson plans that “suggested actions that my students might take to combat global warming.” Hall’s point is clear: who decides what counts as “false information” determines whose worldview the AI enforces.
It doesn’t stop at lesson plans. Hall warns that Khan’s Schoolhouse.world platform began partnering with elite universities like Columbia, MIT, and Johns Hopkins, using “dialogues” portfolios in which high-schoolers “debate topics like immigration or Israel-Palestine, and rate one another on traits like empathy, curiosity or kindness,” as the New York Times reported. Hall writes: “This kind of proxy for a ‘social credit score,’ which can potentially be used to determine university admissions based on social justice virtue signaling, underscores the stakes as AI’s education pioneers work to remake how our children are taught.”
Read more at Politico here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.