Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants artificial intelligence to break what he calls the grip of medical tyranny, arguing that AI chatbots can free Americans to fact-check their own medical advice instead of simply trusting experts. But that embrace is now scrambling his own Make America Healthy Again coalition, pitting grassroots allies worried about data centers against medical experts who say Kennedy fundamentally misunderstands how the technology works.
A Secretary's Bet on Chatbots Over Doctors
Kennedy, who leads the MAHA movement, has said public officials should not dominate people by telling them to trust experts, framing AI as a tool that will help Americans understand, interrogate and compare their health data with evidence and make better decisions alongside their doctors, according to the Chicago Tribune. He has also argued the technology would free up doctors to spend more time actually treating patients rather than managing paperwork.
Not everyone in his orbit is convinced. MAHA voices have criticized Kennedy's support for AI, and medical experts have said his view of the technology as a check against the medical establishment is flawed, per the same Tribune report. Bioethicist Zeke Emanuel put it bluntly, saying Kennedy does not understand how AI actually works, the outlet reported.
Silicon Valley Money Flows Into the MAHA Summit
The skepticism is sharpened by who showed up to back Kennedy's vision. A recent MAHA summit featured AI and Silicon Valley executives, with OpenAI and Anthropic among the sponsors, the station's report notes. Sponsors paid up to $300,000, and many received speaking slots. Senior administration health officials, including Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, also appeared on panels alongside developers of psychedelic drugs, fitness wearables and an experimental cancer test.
Robert Malone called the summit pay-to-play and said physicians, patients or patient advocates were not represented at its core, per the same account. The event was organized by MAHA Center Inc., with Tony Lyons running that group along with the MAHA Institute think tank and MAHA PAC, a political fundraising operation; Lyons has said the goal is simply to build the biggest movement possible to get things done.
The corporate presence lines up with a broader product push. OpenAI and Anthropic now each offer health-focused chatbots that can analyze users' medical records and answer healthcare questions, according to the Tribune's reporting — tools built on models trained on thousands of peer-reviewed medical papers and professional guidelines and refined with feedback from doctors. The National Law Review reported that both companies formally launched these platforms — ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare — in January 2026, allowing users to sync electronic health records and wearable data directly into the chatbots. Demand has exploded in parallel: OpenAI told Fierce Healthcare that more than 300 million people worldwide now ask health and wellness questions on ChatGPT every week, up from 230 million in January.
Washington's Deregulatory Tilt
The administration's enthusiasm for AI extends well past health policy. President Trump revoked a Biden-era executive order on AI oversight, announced a move to let the AI industry police itself, and has resisted greater oversight of AI companies while trying to rebrand the technology as super intelligence, per the Tribune. His administration has touted AI as a solution to rising medical costs, healthcare fraud, physician shortages and rural hospital closures, and Medicare officials have discussed AI healthcare applications with several medical chatbot companies.
Utah offers one real-world test case already cited by federal officials: a state regulatory sandbox let Doctronic process prescription refills under physician review, achieving a 91% physician agreement rate before regulators restricted certain high-risk drugs. Nolla Health's separate acne-prescription program provides initial prescriptions under physician review, followed by other review stages, as Hoodline previously reported. Harvard Law professor Glenn Cohen described officials' view of AI in this space as techno-utopian, according to the Tribune.
Even as federal regulators lean toward lighter touch oversight, they are not entirely absent. The FDA published a discussion paper in August proposing a framework for generative AI medical devices that would evaluate models through competency assessments modeled on physician training, according to the agency. That followed a January update to the FDA's Clinical Decision Support software guidance that expanded exemptions from premarket device review for certain single-directive software functions, easing the path for digital health tools to reach consumers, per McDermott Will & Schulte.
Doctors Push Back on Autonomous AI
Organized medicine is drawing its own line. The American Medical Association has emphasized the concept of augmented intelligence in medicine and developed broad AI policy, according to the American Medical Association. The same survey found that 81% of practicing U.S. physicians used AI tools in their clinical work in 2026, up sharply from 38% in 2023 — adoption concentrated largely in administrative and physician-supervised support rather than unsupervised patient self-diagnosis.
Peer-reviewed research backs up some of that caution. A Mass General Brigham study published in JAMA Network Open evaluated 21 large language models and found that while they reached correct final diagnoses 90% of the time when given complete clinical data, they consistently failed at earlier reasoning steps like generating differential diagnoses, according to EurekAlert. The Tribune separately reported that patients often provide insufficient information for AI to correctly diagnose issues on their own, and that medical chatbots often respond with a combination of good and bad advice.
Not all expert reaction is negative. UC San Francisco's Robert Wachter said AI will empower patients with more health insights, and AI adoption is likely to bolster rather than replace medical professionals' recommendations, per the Tribune's reporting. The outlet also noted that AI fundamentally changes how doctors and patients approach medical decisions, and that recent studies found AI alone sometimes outperformed doctors alone or doctors working with AI on certain critical decisions.
The MAHA Rift Over Data Centers
While Kennedy champions AI as a populist tool, grassroots members of his own movement are fighting its physical footprint. Moms Across America, founded by Zen Honeycutt, organizes campaigns against pollution, water use and electricity costs tied to data centers, according to the Tribune. The group's opposition reflects concerns about data centers' physical footprint, including localized impacts.
The scale of what they are fighting is immense. Global data center power demand driven by AI expansion is projected to grow 170% by 2030 compared with 2025 levels, adding electricity consumption equivalent to Japan's entire annual power load. That collision between Kennedy's tech-forward health agenda and his base's environmental anxieties sits alongside his more familiar focus on curbing artificial colors and undeclared chemical additives in food, an issue that has defined much of his tenure. Kennedy arrived to speak at the Republican convention in Dallas on September 10, and the Tribune's October 6 report frames his AI advocacy as one of the more unresolved tensions within the movement he leads.
