RFK Jr. Says AI Could Give Patients Medical Advice ‘Better Informed Than Any Doctor’

By yourNEWS Media Newsroom

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is placing artificial intelligence at the center of his vision for the future of American medicine, telling a Washington audience that AI could soon provide patients with medical analysis “much better informed than any doctor in the country.”

Kennedy made the remarks Tuesday during the Make America Healthy Again Summit at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, where he joined Vice President JD Vance for a closing fireside chat that ranged from artificial intelligence and medical records to public health guidance and distrust of government institutions.

The health secretary argued that rapidly improving AI systems could allow patients to independently review medical information, obtain additional opinions and assess recommendations from physicians and public officials rather than relying exclusively on traditional health authorities.

According to a full transcript of the discussion, Kennedy said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently visited his office and described a major change in the reliability of medical AI.

Kennedy attributed the following remarks to Altman: “Two years ago, I wouldn’t have advised anybody to take medical advice alone from AI.”

Kennedy said Altman then told him, “But today, i- — it would be malpractice for a doctor to make a diagnosis or to make a prescription without at least checking AI.”

The remark was Kennedy’s account of a private conversation with Altman. Altman has not independently made that specific statement publicly.

Kennedy said HHS wants Americans to gain much easier access to their own health information, envisioning a system in which medical records could be available through personal devices and analyzed quickly by artificial intelligence.

“And AI, and one of the things that we’re doing in our agency is we’re making it easy for every American to use AI to, so that you’ll have access, by the end, by the time we leave, every American will have access on their cell phones to their own medical records,” Kennedy said.

He argued that AI could process a patient’s extensive health history more comprehensively than a physician working within the time constraints of a typical appointment.

“And you may have a medical record that is a thousand pages long. You have six minutes with a doctor today. He is not gonna be able to review it, but the AI can and he can distill it, it can distill it,” Kennedy said.

“It can give you a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country.”

Kennedy’s comments, first detailed in Politico’s coverage of the summit, represented one of the administration’s strongest endorsements yet of using consumer-accessible AI as a significant component of personal health decision-making.

Kennedy did not argue that doctors should disappear from the process. His remarks instead envisioned patients and physicians using AI as another source of analysis, particularly when medical records contain far more information than a clinician can realistically review during a brief appointment.

He then expanded the argument beyond individual doctors, saying AI could fundamentally alter the relationship between Americans and government public health authorities.

“One of the things that is gonna change is that we’re never ever again gonna be able to be dominated by public officials who tell us, ‘Trust the experts,’ because e- — every American will be able to check their own medical, uh, um, advice,” Kennedy said.

He used disputes over COVID-era health recommendations to illustrate his point.

“If somebody tells you, ‘Mask. Work. Trust the experts,’ AI may tell you otherwise,” Kennedy said. “If somebody tells you, ‘Social distancing works. Trust the experts,’ AI may correct that.”

Kennedy continued: “And if somebody tells you that a vaccine will prevent transmission and infection, ‘Oh, you need to take it to protect your grandmother,’ AI may say it actually doesn’t do that.”

The secretary concluded that artificial intelligence “really has the capacity to dominate us, to free us from medical tyranny.”

A video clip of Kennedy’s remarks circulated widely following the summit.

AI systems do not inherently provide a single authoritative answer to disputed scientific questions. Their output depends on the model, underlying information, prompts, safeguards and other factors, and different systems can produce conflicting or inaccurate responses. Kennedy’s remarks reflected his expectation that the technology will give individuals another means of examining health claims rather than establishing that AI currently supersedes physicians or established medical evidence.

The exchange also underscored Kennedy’s longstanding criticism of the way government health agencies communicated with Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Questions about masks, distancing and vaccination changed over the course of the pandemic as new variants emerged, population immunity increased and scientific evidence developed. COVID vaccines were shown to reduce the risk of severe illness and death, while protection against infection and transmission was less complete and declined over time.

Kennedy has repeatedly argued that public officials overstated the certainty of some recommendations and discouraged legitimate challenges to government policy.

At Tuesday’s event, he portrayed AI as a tool that could reduce dependence on institutional authority by giving individuals direct access to large amounts of health information and the ability to analyze it themselves.

Vance responded to the unexpected emphasis on artificial intelligence with a joke.

“I guess I’m in the wrong summit. I thought this was about weight loss and acid, not A.I.,” the vice president said.

Artificial intelligence nevertheless occupied a prominent place throughout the event.

The official MAHA Summit program included representatives from Anthropic, OpenAI and numerous health care, technology and data companies. The summit was held Sept. 29 at the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC and brought together administration officials, corporate executives, researchers and figures associated with the broader MAHA movement.

Sponsors included Walmart, cancer-screening company Grail and AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI.

Other Trump administration officials appearing at the event included Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz.

The corporate presence illustrated the growing involvement of large technology and health care companies in a movement that initially drew much of its support from people skeptical of pharmaceutical companies, food manufacturers and other major institutions.

Some longtime MAHA figures criticized that shift.

Dr. Robert Malone, who previously served as vice chairman of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, criticized the summit’s corporate orientation before the event.

“It’s all a grift,” Malone said.

Malone had been appointed to ACIP by Kennedy in 2025 after the health secretary replaced the committee’s previous members.

A federal judge in March questioned whether Kennedy’s reconstituted advisory committee had been lawfully appointed and whether the government had demonstrated that its members possessed the required vaccine-related expertise. The ruling temporarily blocked the panel’s work.

Malone disputed the court’s characterization of his qualifications and subsequently resigned from the committee.

In his own criticism of the 2026 summit, Malone argued that corporate executives and technology companies had acquired an increasingly prominent role at an event associated with a movement built in part around opposition to corporate influence over health policy.

Kennedy, however, used the gathering to argue that technology companies could play an important role in addressing chronic disease and reorganizing how health information is used.

He said one of his broader goals is to consolidate health datasets that are currently dispersed among government agencies, health systems and other organizations so researchers and AI tools can analyze them more effectively.

“If we don’t solve the problem of chronic disease, we’re not going to lower healthcare costs,” Kennedy said during the summit. “We need [AI superintelligence] to do that, and we need to consolidate all of these datasets and make them readable.”

That approach would represent a substantial expansion of the role artificial intelligence plays in American medicine.

AI is already being used in areas including medical imaging, clinical documentation, drug development, diagnostic support and the analysis of health records. Consumer AI systems have also increasingly become a source of health information for patients seeking explanations of symptoms, laboratory results and medical terminology.

Kennedy’s vision goes further by proposing that ordinary Americans routinely use AI to examine their own complete health records and compare its analysis with advice from their doctors or government health agencies.

The proposal also raises questions about medical accuracy, privacy, liability and responsibility when an AI-generated recommendation differs from one offered by a licensed clinician.

Kennedy acknowledged that the technology has potential disadvantages, saying AI has “upsides and downsides,” but focused heavily on its ability to broaden access to medical information and challenge institutional authority.

His comments come as the Trump administration simultaneously promotes rapid American AI development while confronting questions about the risks created by increasingly autonomous systems.

A day before the MAHA discussion, leading technology companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia and xAI signed a voluntary White House AI safety agreement. President Donald Trump described that pact as “morally binding.”

Kennedy’s remarks place health care among the fields where the administration expects increasingly capable AI to have its most direct effect on ordinary Americans.

Rather than framing the technology primarily as an administrative tool for hospitals or a research system for scientists, Kennedy presented AI as something patients themselves could carry on their phones and use to question diagnoses, prescriptions and public health recommendations.

If that vision is implemented, the health secretary said Americans could enter a medical system in which access to information traditionally controlled by physicians, hospitals and government agencies becomes increasingly available for individuals to analyze independently.

For Kennedy, that possibility represents more than a technological change.

It is part of a broader effort to alter who holds authority over medical information — and to give patients another source to consult when they question what doctors or government health officials are telling them.