RFK Jr. Wants to AI-ify Health Care. Claude Says He’s Full of Sh*t.
The Bulwark · C · trust 44/100
Kennedy is suddenly bullish on artificial intelligence—so we asked some AI assistants to rate his vaccine claims.
Jonathan Cohn October 4 Upgrade to listen 15 minutes 511 72 82 (Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/ The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock, Claude) ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. BECOMING a huge AI cheerleader probably wasn’t on your 2026 bingo card. It certainly wasn’t on mine.
But there was Kennedy on Tuesday , speaking in his capacity as the secretary of health and human services, talking about the potential of artificial intelligence to help pinpoint what’s wrong with people when they are sick or injured.
“It would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis, or to make a prescription, without at least checking AI,” Kennedy said at a MAHA Action conference in Washington. 1
MAHA, of course, stands for “Make America Healthy Again,” the movement that Kennedy has been leading, which is known for its hostility to all things artificial. But Kennedy doesn’t see AI as yet another way for science to disrupt the natural order. Rather, he said to the MAHA attendees, AI will let average people challenge the establishment of doctors and scientists, and make up their own minds about what constitutes good medical care.
As an example, Kennedy suggested how people could have used AI during the COVID pandemic, when public health officials promoted vaccination as a way to protect the elderly and others with weaker immune systems. “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,” Kennedy said.
Or to put it more bluntly, as Kennedy did later, AI would “free us from medical tyranny.”
It might surprise you to hear I think Kennedy is right about the potential of AI to transform medicine, and in a good way. Some of the most promising possible uses of AI—assuming it doesn’t, you know, extinguish humanity —lie in its ability to help providers make more accurate diagnoses.
The immense value of AI systems in making diagnoses in fields where they can be trained on enormous datasets has been widely recognized over the past few years; for example, in diagnostic imaging, by training on vast numbers of x-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and ultrasounds, AI systems can detect diagnostic patterns too subtle or complex for even experienced clinicians to detect consistently.
The potential value of AI is also growing in fields like cancer treatment, where the sheer volume of relevant clinical information is so great—and changing so quickly—that even the most capable oncologists can’t keep it all in their heads.
“The data are pretty good that AI is more accurate than physicians at creating a differential diagnosis,” Ezekiel Emanuel , the University of Pennsylvania oncologist, bioethicist, and author, told me over email. He and two collaborators recently generated some controversy by suggesting in a Journal of the American Medical Association article that medical decision-making by AI alone was frequently superior to decision-making by doctors who merely consult AI. But, Emanuel told me, you don’t even have to believe that to see the upside potential.
“In many cases there is not going to be a need to check with AI,” Emanuel said. “But in hard cases, there may be good reason to check with AI. All physicians have had ‘tough cases’ that do not exactly fit with symptoms or lab tests that puzzle them.”
AI could also boost health care by operating as a force multiplier: It can enable professionals without the full training of a doctor to provide front-line medical care in places where doctors are in short supply.
Experts have talked for years about tapping that potential as a way to help some of the most impoverished parts of the world—or even impoverished parts of the United States. And in the past few months, Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has been touting AI’s potential as a way to address provider shortages in rural areas.
The reason AI can do all of that is that it excels at gathering, digesting, and applying information—including scientific data. And this characteristic makes it useful for debunking charlatans, cranks, and conspiracy theorists, including those peddling unfounded claims about the dangers of vaccines.
In other words, it’s a terrific fact-checker for Kennedy, as I discovered myself last week.
INSPIRED BY HIS CALL TO USE AI, I went ahead and asked Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) to analyze some of Kennedy’s more memorable statements. I used the professional, paid version, because it provides access to more capable AI models that can produce more accurate results, and I started with one of Kennedy’s favorite claims: that the scientific community hasn’t seriously investigated links between vaccines and autism.
Kennedy has cited this alleged failing to justify his agenda of unwinding federal support for vaccines. A version of the statement now even appears on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To get an accurate read on it, I fed Claude a recent version of Kennedy’s linkage between vaccines and autism—one he gave just a few weeks ago during a speech to Children’s Health Defense, the organization that he led from 2015 to 2023 and that has done as much as any to undermine faith in vaccines.
Here was the quote , which refers to eighteen vaccines the CDC has been recommending for children:
In fact, of all of those ninety-four doses of the eighteen vaccines, only one of them was subject to a placebo control trial and that was the COVID vaccine. The other ones were like this. There was no safety study. We have no idea what the risk profile is for these products. And you know that means we can’t really make the kind of risk-benefit analysis that my agency is supposed to do.
The first misleading claim was on the number of doses (which Kennedy inflated). The second was about the supposed lack of placebo…
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