Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has built a national following by channeling the energy of Americans who worry about the influence of corporations, including makers of vaccines, drugs, processed foods and pesticides.

Yet last week, the leader of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement came out in support of a rather improbable industry: artificial intelligence.

Addressing a MAHA summit that featured AI and Silicon Valley executives, Kennedy asserted that the technology would free Americans from “medical tyranny” by enabling them to “fact check their own medical advice.”

“We will never again be dominated by public officials who tell us: ‘Trust the experts,’” Kennedy told the invite-only audience.

Some prominent MAHA voices were quick to criticize Kennedy's embrace of AI, contending that the movement's leaders are increasingly cozying up to the corporate interests they once scrutinized.

At the same time, medical experts say Kennedy's vision of AI as a check against the medical establishment is fundamentally flawed.

“He clearly doesn’t understand how AI works,” said Dr. Zeke Emanuel, a cancer specialist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania.

“AI gathers the information we have in the medical literature and in case studies.

And that means what you’re actually getting is medical expertise.”

Both OpenAI and Anthropic provide health-focused chatbots that can analyze users' medical records and answer their healthcare questions.

Their models are trained on thousands of peer-reviewed medical papers and professional guidelines, and they incorporate feedback from doctors.

"He wants AI to replicate his utterances," Emanuel said.

"But that is not what effective AI is going to do."

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard stated that Emanuel was referring to “one narrow use” of the technology.

Kennedy wants to give Americans more control over their own health data by using AI “to help them understand it, interrogate it, compare it with the evidence, and make better decisions with their doctors,” Hilliard said.

The technology will help doctors work faster, giving them “more time to treat and care for patients,” she added.

OpenAI and Anthropic were among the sponsors of last week’s MAHA Summit, as were more than a dozen other companies with pending business before the U.S. government, among them developers of psychedelic drugs, fitness wearables and an experimental cancer test.

Sponsors contributed sums reaching $300,000, and many were granted speaking slots on panels that featured some of the administration's foremost health officials, among them Dr. Mehmet Oz of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

"It was a classic case of 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 figures in the MAHA movement say the summit showed how big companies are replacing the “MAHA moms” and other grassroots activists who originally powered the movement.

"There was no representation of the people who have been at the heart of MAHA and its creation, whether physicians, patients, or patient advocates," Malone said.

The summit was convened by MAHA Center Inc., one of several nongovernmental organizations operated by Kennedy associates and committed to advancing his agenda.

Among the others are the MAHA Institute, a think tank, and MAHA PAC, a political fundraising entity.

Tony Lyons, a publisher at the helm of the MAHA Center, MAHA PAC and several affiliated organizations, addressed concerns regarding corporate sponsorships during a reception held in advance of the summit.

"The reality is that we are endeavouring to construct the most extensive movement we possibly can in order to genuinely accomplish things," Lyons said.

Kennedy's alliance with Silicon Valley fits with broader efforts across the Trump administration.

President Donald Trump has vigorously resisted efforts to increase oversight of AI companies, which have helped drive the stock market to record highs.

One of Trump's first actions after returning to the White House was to revoke 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 has announced a move to allow the AI industry to police itself, attempted to rebrand the technology as “super intelligence” and dismissed bipartisan concerns regarding the impacts of data centers on nearby residents.

Meanwhile, Dr. Oz and other administration officials have promoted AI as the solution 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 talks with several medical chatbot companies, including one behind a Utah program that provides AI-enabled prescription refills.

Glenn Cohen, a bioethics expert at Harvard Law School, says that the remarks made by Kennedy and other officials last week reflect a “techno-utopian” view of AI’s potential benefits.

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.”

Several of the most prominent MAHA organizations are actively mobilizing against AI interests.

For instance, Moms Across America orchestrates both local and national campaigns cautioning against the pollution, water consumption, and electricity expenses linked to the construction of data centers.

The organization was established by Zen Honeycutt, a former staffer for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

Moms Across America did not respond to a request for comment.

AI experts do not dispute that the technology will fundamentally transform the way doctors and patients approach medical decisions.

Dr. Robert Wachter, a medical technology expert at the University of California, San Francisco, agrees with Kennedy's claim that AI will give patients deeper insights into their health.

However, according to Wachter, the adoption of AI is likely to strengthen the recommendations of medical professionals rather than the opposing views that Kennedy often favors.

“Democratization is a good thing,” Wachter said.

“But that means spreading the best science we have, which usually means science produced by people who know what they are talking about.”

Experts remain divided as to how soon AI might assume decision-making responsibilities from physicians.

Several recent studies have demonstrated that AI, operating independently, surpassed both physicians working alone and physicians collaborating with AI when it came to critical decisions.

However, those studies generally furnished AI with detailed, written scenarios to resolve — the equivalent of a medical examination.

When researchers examined how patients interact with AI in real time, they identified a number of problems: people frequently fail to supply sufficient information for the AI to correctly diagnose their medical issue, and chatbots often respond with a combination of sound and poor advice.

“We need to ascertain in real-world conditions: Do these things actually work?” Wachter said.

“What actually transpires when they’re deployed in circumstances where people are under stress or don’t know how to interpret the outputs?”

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