The Trump administration is not pleased about a Biden-era, private-sector-led nonprofit that vets AI tools for use in healthcare settings.
The Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) came under criticism from top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services last week, Politico reports.
With laboratories at Duke, Stanford, and Mayo Clinic, CHAI works with the private tech and healthcare sectors to develop guidelines and best practices for AI implementation. The founding partners of the coalition include hospitals like Mass General Brigham, healthcare companies like CVS and UnitedHealth, and big tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
“CHAI is this public-private partnership where you have private sector innovators informing public sector officials, and the public sector is able to make better informed policies coming out of there,” CHAI CEO Brian Anderson told Gizmodo.
The non-profit currently has roughly 15 use-case working groups, each led by researchers from the likes of Amazon, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, and more. The Coalition is also planning to launch a nationwide registry of model cards—kind of like nutritional labels that provide high-level information on AI models—to better inform health systems that are looking to procure AI models.
Trump admin officials are now claiming that the organization’s real aim is to stifle health tech startups and AI development.
“Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services gave CHAI and its Big Tech backers the power to regulate and stifle health-tech startups. This took regulatory capture to a whole new level — one of regulatory outsourcing,” deputy HHS secretary Jim O’Neill and FDA commissioner Marty Makary said in a guest article published by conservative newspaper Washington Examiner last week.
CHAI CEO Brian Anderson argues against that characterization.
“CHAI has nothing to do with government regulation. The government decides on policy and regulation, and CHAI, we will adapt to that,” Anderson said. “[But] in a public-private partnership, we want ideally to inform our regulators and our policymakers so they make informed regulations.”
CHAI has no actual regulatory power, but O’Neill told Politico last week that he has heard from industry officials who have raised concerns that startups that want to work in the space feel as if they need to be a member of the organization. O’Neill believes CHAI holds the potential to become a “cartel” that suppresses innovation in health AI.
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