AMA News Wire

White House AI plan could help boost transparency, oversight

Jul 25, 2025

What’s the news: The White House this week unveiled its action plan on AI, identifying more than 90 recommended policy changes in federal government policy that the Trump administration will pursue in the coming months. According to the White House, the plan is built on three pillars: “accelerating innovation, building American AI infrastructure and leading in international diplomacy and security.”

The plan is an encouraging step forward, as the administration is prioritizing the responsible development and deployment of augmented intelligence (AI)—often called artificial intelligence—to improve health outcomes.

The AMA applauds the plan’s commitments to:

  • Build public and professional trust through transparent, ethical oversight.
  • Accelerate national standards for safety, performance and interoperability—with strong physician representation.
  • Create a coordinated federal regulatory approach to close gaps and reduce duplication.
  • Invest in workforce education and upskilling to support safe adoption.
  • Promote “secure-by-design” AI systems to protect health infrastructure.

The AMA also welcomes to the opportunity to work with the administration to address key areas that deserve more attention. These include:

  • An emphasis on meaningful physician leadership in shaping AI policy, regulation, and implementation.
  • Enhanced privacy protections that provide patients with clear, robust safeguards—especially in open-data or open-source environments.
  • Clear liability frameworks to address physician liability concerns and ensure appropriately apportioned accountability for AI errors and performance issues.
  • Greater attention to equity and bias to ensure AI does not lead to patient harm and worsen existing health disparities.
  • A whole-of-government approach that includes states to ensure balanced, consistent regulatory oversight.

Why it’s important: From AI implementation to EHR adoption and usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors—not a burden.

The AMA is committed to ensuring that AI can meet its full potential to advance clinical care and improve clinician well-being. As the number of AI-enabled health care tools continue to grow, it is critical that they are designed, developed and deployed in a manner that is ethical, equitable and responsible. The use of AI in health care must be transparent to both physicians and patients. 

In addition to medical devices, AI is increasingly used in health care administration or to reduce physician burden, and policy and guidance for both device and non-device use of health care AI is necessary. 

Recognizing this, the AMA has developed policy (PDF) that addresses the development, deployment and use of health care AI, with particular emphasis on:

  • Health care AI oversight.
  • When and what to disclose to advance AI transparency.
  • Generative AI policies and governance.
  • Physician liability for use of AI-enabled technologies.
  • AI data privacy and cybersecurity.
  • Payer use of AI and automated decision-making systems.

In June, the AMA House of Delegates adopted new policy to help ensure that health AI is “explainable,” validated, well defined and is not used to conduct medical research fraud.

AMA survey research from 2024 shows (PDF) that physicians are largely enthusiastic about the potential of AI in health care, with 68% seeing at least some advantage to the use of AI in their practice. Meanwhile, 66% reported using some type of AI tool in practice. 

Learn more: The AMA STEPS Forward® “Governance for Augmented Intelligence” toolkit, developed in collaboration with Manatt Health, is a comprehensive eight-step guide for health care systems to establish a governance framework to implement, manage and scale AI solutions.

Catch up with this AMA report on emerging landscape of health care AI. Also, explore how to apply AI to transform health care with the “AMA ChangeMedEd® Artificial Intelligence in Health Care Series.”

In addition, check out JAMA+ AI, which offers scientific content, educational reviews and commentary on AI and medicine published across JAMA®, JAMA Network Open and the JAMA specialty journals.

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