Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence can provide patients a second opinion that is "much better informed than any doctor in the country."
During a fireside chat with Vice President JD Vance at the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Summit, Kennedy also said that AI would free patients from "medical tyranny."
"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, because every American will be able to check their own medical advice, but they'll also be able to check the advice of public officials," said Kennedy, who has a two-decade history of promoting vaccine skepticism.
"If somebody tells you masks work, trust the experts, and AI may tell you otherwise. If somebody tells you social distancing works, trust the experts, AI may correct that. And if somebody tells you that vaccines will prevent transmission and infection, and you need to take it to protect your grandmother, AI may say it actually doesn't do that," the HHS Secretary said on Tuesday.
According to Politico and STAT, corporate sponsors of the MAHA Summit included Walmart, OpenAI and Anthropic.
This week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming artificial intelligence to "super intelligence." The executive order said the term "more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies."
Kennedy's remarks come as the Trump Administration is accelerating efforts to expand artificial intelligence's role in healthcare, with clinical AI emerging as a top strategic priority for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
"One of the things that we're doing in our agency is we're making it easy for every American to use AI too. By the time we leave, every American will have access on their cell phones to their own medical records, and you may have a medical record that's 1,000 pages long. You have six minutes with a doctor today. He's not going to be able to review it, but the AI can distill it," Kennedy said.
Major medical organizations immediately pushed back on Kennedys' claim that AI is superior to doctors, while also stressing that doctors must remain central to clinical decision-making and AI deployment.
"Statements suggesting AI is inherently better informed than physicians, or that physicians cannot be trusted to make clinical decisions without first consulting this technology, diminish physician expertise and risk undermining patients’ trust," six medical societies, including the American Medical Association, said in a statement issued Wednesday.
The joint statement was issued by the AMA along with the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American College of Physicians and the American College of Surgeons.
"Physicians evaluate patients in context, drawing on years of training and experience. They ask questions, understand each patient’s unique needs and circumstances, exercise professional judgment and take responsibility for the care they provide," the organizations said. "Physicians have long embraced technologies that improve care, and AI has tremendous potential to provide new tools and insights. But patient safety, physician expertise and the humanity of clinical practice must guide how these tools are developed and used."
"Pitting physicians against technology or suggesting AI should replace physician expertise does not advance this important work. We need to move carefully, and we need to get this right," the organizations said. "As medical societies representing physicians across the country, we are committed to ensuring physicians help lead the responsible development and use of AI in medicine."
Kennedy's comments suggesting that AI is inherently more informed than physicians, or could replace doctors, throws fuel on an intensifying debate about the use of AI in medicine, and the future role of physicians as AI-enabled care grows.
In August, a provocative opinion piece published in the medical journal JAMA argues that autonomous AI will outperform both physicians and physician-AI teams on many cognitive medical tasks. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, M.D., Ph.D., an oncologist, bioethicist and a former White House policy advisor, along with Neal Khosla, the co-founder and CEO of Curai Health, Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, and researcher Abe Baker-Butler, authored the Perspective article published August 17 that argues that AI-alone medical care is likely to be better than physician-only or physician-AI hybrid care.
The opinion piece prompted intense debate and discussion both on- and offline.
In a LinkedIn post, John Whyte, the CEO of the American Medical Association, wrote, "I respect and appreciate Zeke’s views on a variety of issues, but on this one, we are going to have to disagree. Zeke may be right about the tasks. But medicine is not a collection of tasks. Getting the diagnosis right matters. Choosing the right test matters. Recommending the right treatment matters."
Medicine still requires human judgment, empathy and an understanding of patients' individual circumstances, Whyte argued.
Earlier this week, McKinsey & Company issued a report asserting that AI already can perform a sizable share of outpatient clinical work. McKinsey estimates that 16% to 22% of U.S. outpatient claims, or roughly 2 billion to 3 billion claims annually, involve services that clinical AI could perform. Most of that volume comes from low-complexity evaluation and management visits and diagnostic or imaging interpretation.
McKinsey argues that clinical AI is taking on a growing share of nonphysical care, such as patient intake, triage, diagnosis, guidance, referrals and follow-up management. When "discursive care" AI reaches scale, it will restructure patient volumes, unlock clinician capacity and force the evolution of traditional reimbursement models, according to the report authors. The effects will be most prominent in outpatient care, which mostly involves diagnosis, care planning, patient guidance and follow-up management, the report authors wrote.
AI-enabled care models could improve care access for patients, alleviate workforce shortages and improve care quality, McKinsey argues in the report.
Rather than replacing clinicians, the firm expects AI to automate routine cognitive work while physicians focus on complex decision-making, oversight and patient relationships. The report also warns of risks such as clinician deskilling and emphasizes that widespread adoption will depend on trust, privacy protections and appropriate guardrails.