WASHINGTON – Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has built a national base by tapping into concerns about corporate power, including the influence of vaccine manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, processed-food producers and pesticide makers.
Yet last week, the leader of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement offered an enthusiastic endorsement of an industry many of his supporters might not have expected: artificial intelligence.
Speaking at a MAHA summit attended by AI and Silicon Valley executives, Kennedy said the technology could liberate Americans from “medical tyranny” by enabling 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 gathering.
Several prominent MAHA figures swiftly pushed back, arguing that the movement’s leadership is becoming increasingly aligned with the corporate interests it once challenged.
Medical experts, meanwhile, say Kennedy’s portrayal of artificial intelligence as a counterweight to the medical establishment misunderstands how the technology works.
“He obviously doesn’t understand how AI works,” said Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a cancer specialist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. “AI aggregates the information we have in the medical literature and in case studies. And that means what you’re actually getting is medical expertise.”
OpenAI and Anthropic both offer health-focused chatbots capable of analyzing users’ medical records and responding to healthcare questions. Their systems are trained on thousands of peer-reviewed medical studies and professional guidelines, while also incorporating feedback from physicians.
“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 said Emanuel was describing “one narrow use” of artificial intelligence.
Kennedy’s goal, Hilliard said, is to give Americans greater control over 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.” She added that the technology could also help physicians work more efficiently, giving them “more time to treat and care for patients.”
MAHA leader defends corporate sponsorships
OpenAI and Anthropic were among the sponsors of last week’s MAHA Summit. More than a dozen other companies also provided support, including firms with pending business before the U.S. government and developers of psychedelic drugs, fitness wearables and an experimental cancer test.
Sponsors paid as much as $300,000, and many were given speaking opportunities on panels featuring some of the administration’s leading health officials, including Dr. Mehmet Oz of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“It was classic pay-to-play,” said Dr. Robert Malone, a vaccine researcher who has questioned the safety of mRNA shots and recently served on a federal vaccine panel under Kennedy.
Malone and other MAHA activists said the summit reflected a broader shift, with large companies taking the place of the “MAHA moms” and other grassroots organizers who helped build the movement.
“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.
The event was organized by MAHA Center Inc., one of several nongovernmental organizations operated by Kennedy associates to advance his agenda. The others include the MAHA Institute, a think tank, and MAHA PAC, a political fundraising organization.
Tony Lyons, the publisher who runs the MAHA Center, MAHA PAC and several affiliated groups, addressed concerns about the corporate backing during a reception held before the summit.
“The truth is we’re trying to build the biggest movement we can possibly build to actually get things done,” Lyons said.
The Trump administration has embraced AI
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Kennedy’s alliance with Silicon Valley is consistent with broader efforts across the Trump administration.
President Donald Trump has vigorously resisted efforts to bring greater oversight to AI companies, who have helped drive the stock market to record highs. One of Trump’s first actions after returning to the White House was revoking a Biden administration executive order on AI oversight. It took the administration more than 16 months to replace it with its own order.
In recent weeks, Trump announced a move to let the AI industry police itself, tried to rebrand the technology as “super intelligence” and brushed aside bipartisan concerns about the impacts of data centers on nearby residents.
Meanwhile, Dr. Oz and other administration officials have touted AI as the answer to a litany of U.S. health problems, including rising medical costs, healthcare fraud, physician shortages and the shuttering of rural hospitals.
Medicare officials have been in discussions with several medical chatbot companies, including one behind a Utah program that provides AI-enabled refills of prescriptions.
The remarks from Kennedy and other officials last week reflect a “techno-utopian” view of AI’s potential benefits, says Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School bioethics expert.
Cohen notes that much of RFK’s agenda over the past year has focused on trying to curb food industry practices he views as harmful to consumers, including the use of artificial colors and undeclared chemical additives. Given Kennedy’s skepticism of “big food,” Cohen said he was surprised the health secretary didn’t see “the risk that market incentives may diverge from the public good.”
Some of the most prominent MAHA organizations are actively organizing against AI interests.
For example, Moms Across America operates local and national campaigns warning against pollution, water use and electricity costs associated with data center construction. The group was founded by Zen Honeycutt, a former staffer for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
Moms Across America did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not yet clear how AI will integrate into US healthcare
AI experts don’t dispute that the technology will fundamentally change how doctors and patients approach medical decisions.
Kennedy is correct when he says AI will empower patients with more insights about their health, says Dr. Robert Wachter, a medical technology expert at University of California, San Francisco. But AI adoption is likely to further bolster the recommendations of medical professionals, rather than the contrarian views often favored by Kennedy, according to Wachter.
“Democratization is good,” Wachter said. “But that means disseminating the best science we have, which generally means science created by people who know what they’re talking about.”
Experts disagree over how soon AI may be able to take over decision-making from physicians.
Several recent studies have found that AI alone outperformed doctors working alone or doctors working with AI on critical decisions. But those studies generally presented AI with detailed, written scenarios to solve — the equivalent of a medical exam.
When researchers looked at how patients interact with AI in real-time they found a number of problems: People often don’t provide enough information for the AI to correctly diagnose their medical issue and chatbots often respond with a combination of good and bad advice.
“We need to figure out in real life: Do these things actually work?” Wachter said. “What actually happens when they’re used in circumstances where people are under stress or don’t know how to interpret the outputs?”
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