WHAT WE DON’T KNOW
If fully autonomous AI doctors will ever be legal. The paper’s authors noted a handful of liability, reimbursement and regulatory hurdles remain unresolved and, as of now, won’t allow for non-human-doctors to administer care on their own.
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CONTRA
Robert Wachter, one of American medicine’s most prominent voices on AI, argued in his 2026 book “A Giant Leap” that AI-aided physicians will remain the best of the best in medicine while the “economy class” of patients will receive AI-only care. The American Medical Association and American College of Physicians both insist AI must remain in a “supportive role” to “ensure maximum benefit and minimum harm to patients.”
SURPRISING FACT
The authors compared AI’s place in medicine to its introduction to the game of chess. Deep Blue, a custom supercomputer built by IBM for chess-playing, beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a game in 1997. For more than a decade after, human-AI teams ruled the sport until AI alone blew past those hybrids by 2017. The authors think medicine is on the same curve, with one twist chess grandmasters didn’t face: the longer doctors lean on AI for cognitive work, the more their own clinical skills erode—making the eventual handoff harder to reverse.
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FORBES VALUATION
Neal Khosla is CEO of Curai Health, an AI-driven primary care company. His father, Vinod Khosla, is a venture capital billionaire who invests in experimental technologies like biomedicine and robotics. Vinod Khosla, now worth an estimated $13.5 billion, was one of the first venture capitalists to invest in OpenAI, an affiliation that was noted among the new paper’s conflict of interest disclosures. Vinod Khosla recently led an investor group that bought the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks at a $9.6 billion valuation.
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FURTHER READING
Forbes4 In 5 Doctors Now Use AI In Their Practices, AMA Survey SaysBy Bruce JapsenForbesThe Clinical AI Tools Changing How Doctors Practice MedicineBy Garth FriesenForbes AustraliaThis AI founder became a billionaire by building ChatGPT for doctors