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WASHINGTON -- Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has built a national following by channeling the energy of Americans who are worried about the influence of corporations, including makers of vaccines, drugs, processed foods and pesticides.
But last week the leader of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement threw his support behind an unlikely industry: artificial intelligence.
At a MAHA summit featuring AI and Silicon Valley executives, Kennedy declared that the technology would free Americans from "medical tyranny" by allowing 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 audience.
Some prominent MAHA voices quickly criticized Kennedy's embrace of AI, saying 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 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."
Both OpenAI and Anthropic offer 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 incorporate feedback from doctors.
"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 the technology.
Kennedy wants to give Americans more control of 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. So were more than a dozen other companies with pending business before the U.S. government, including developers of psychedelic drugs, fitness wearables and an experimental cancer test.
Sponsors paid up to $300,000 and many received speaking slots on panels that included some of the administration's top 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 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.