RFK Jr. says AI gives a better second opinion than any doctor
Two stories worth your time before the wire fills up with DevDay follow-ups: the US health secretary's new position on who Americans should trust for medical advice, and China's biggest assistant turning into a travel agent the day before Golden Week.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a MAHA summit audience that AI can give patients "a second opinion that is much better informed than any doctor in the country," and claimed it has the power to "free us from medical tyranny." Kennedy made the remarks on Tuesday in a fireside chat with Vice President JD Vance closing out the Make America Healthy Again summit. Touting the technology's ability to digest thousand-page medical records, he said health policymaking will never again be dominated by officials who tell the public to "trust the experts," and offered a list of things AI "may" contradict: that masks work, that social distancing works, that vaccines prevent transmission and infection. He also relayed an anecdote — his account, not a confirmed quote — that Sam Altman recently told him it would now be "malpractice" to make a diagnosis or write a prescription without checking with AI, a position Altman would not have taken two years ago.
The logic here has an awkward shape, and it is worth naming plainly. An HHS secretary who has spent years telling Americans not to trust medical experts is now asking them to route that same trust through a chatbot that carries no professional licence, no duty of care, and no liability for a wrong answer. Vance, sitting across from him, half-noticed the tension — he joked that he might be at the wrong summit, "I thought this was about weight loss and acid, not A.I." — and then landed somewhere more conventional than the man next to him: model harms are mostly about systems "literally trained to hack into your computer," and a "pretty standard product liability approach makes a lot of sense. If you create a product that harms people, you should suffer consequences for it." He dismissed the extinction scenarios as doom-mongering. It is worth remembering that the summit's corporate sponsors include Anthropic and OpenAI, which is context for any AI-health enthusiasm delivered from that stage — and it sits oddly against the administration's own position this week, where we covered the six-CEO self-audit pledge signed at the White House instead of binding rules.
What to watch: whether HHS turns any of this into procurement — pilots, guidance, or federal health IT that puts a model between a patient and a clinician — because that is where a rhetorical claim becomes a policy one.
ByteDance's Doubao now books flights, train tickets, rides and navigation from a single sentence in the chat box. The assistant added a "Travel with Doubao" entry point covering four scenario clusters — maps and navigation, intercity travel, hotels and food. Bookings run through third-party services: flight and rail inventory from dedicated booking apps, rides through Caocao Mobility, navigation routing from Baidu Maps. The pitch is deliberately unglamorous — say "book me a flight from Beijing to Shanghai tomorrow" or "call a car to the airport" and the assistant resolves the intent and makes the call, with no app switching. ByteDance timed the launch to the National Day holiday week, the single busiest travel window of the Chinese year.
That timing is the story. Agentic commerce is the fight every major lab is now in — OpenAI shipped always-on agents with their own cloud computers this week, Meta's Muse is inside a consumer app, and Google is defending its distribution in Brussels. Doubao is the one assistant in that race that already has mass consumer install base in a market where the travel, mapping and ride-hailing services an agent needs to call are domestic and reachable through partnerships rather than APIs the lab has to negotiate from outside. Whoever wires up the checkout flow for a holiday booking owns a habit that repeats every twelve months.
If an assistant books the flight and the model silently picks a worse one, who should be on the hook — the model maker, the booking partner, or nobody? Tell us in the comments.
