2026-06-04 20:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. The number of these filings has more than doubled compared to before 2023. She puts that jump down to AI.
But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. Judges are starting to question what rights and duties chatbots should have as they stand in for lawyers. Lawmakers, meanwhile, are grappling with who should pay the price when chatbots produce bad legal advice.
Read the full story on how AI is reshaping access to the law.
—Michelle Kim
Would you take a payment to ramp down your electricity use? Would it change anything if you were doing so to help power a local data center? A new project backed by Google will put those questions to the test.
The company has signed a deal to fund a virtual power plant in the largest power grid in the US. The system will group together devices like electric vehicles and smart thermostats, paying customers to adjust their usage when the grid is stretched.
The project could free up capacity for Google’s data centers—but there’s a catch: people might not play along. Find out what the future holds for these virtual power plants.
—Casey Crownhart
This story is from The Spark, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things climate. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Wednesday.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The EU has proposed new legislation to end its Big Tech dependence
The laws aim to boost domestic cloud, AI and semiconductors. (CNBC)
+ US firms would be blocked from critical public tenders. (Reuters $)
+ It also wants to make sure non-EU actors cannot disrupt tech services with a “kill switch.” (The Guardian)
+ But the proposal needs to be negotiated with EU member states. (Politico $)
2 Intelligence agencies warn Chinese spies are recruiting on LinkedIn
The Five Eyes alliance said Beijing is using job platforms for espionage. (BBC)
+ The spies are allegedly recruiting government and military staff. (Politico $)
+ The Chinese embassy in the UK condemned the accusations. (Bloomberg $)
+ Meet the man hunting the spies in your smartphone. (MIT Technology Review)
3 AI CEOs have called for a law protecting against biological weapons
They warn that synthetic DNA could be used for bioweapons. (Wired $)
+ Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis joined the call. (WSJ $)
+ No one’s sure if synthetic mirror life will kill us all. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Firms are using Reddit to manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI search
They’re spamming subreddits to get posts scraped by chatbots. (404 Media)
+ What we’ve been getting wrong about AI’s truth crisis. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Meta keeps delaying the launch of its new AI model
The new Muse Spark AI model API still has no release date. (WSJ $)
+ Which is hampering Meta’s plans to monetize its AI investments. (Reuters $)
6 For the first time, a US city has voted to permanently ban data centers
Monterey Park, California, voted in favor of the move. (LA Times)
+ Should we be moving data centers to space? (MIT Technology Review)
7 China is betting on household chore training to advance robotics
Data harvested in homes and factories provides a scaling edge. (Rest of World)
+ Gig workers are training humanoids at home. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Sam Altman will urge US lawmakers not to require AI model approvals
He’s advocating against proposals for new AI rules. (Reuters $)
+ His move comes after President Trump signed a new AI order. (Wired $)
9 Quantinuum raised $1.68 billion in an IPO as quantum computing rises
Investors flocked to one of the fast-growing sector’s leaders. (Reuters $)
10 Someone finally wants to hire philosophers: Silicon Valley
Big tech hopes they will help build better machines. (The Atlantic $)
Quote of the day
—Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, former hacker and US director of ControlAI, tells the Financial Times why he’s concerned about Anthropic’s relentless race to the top.
One More Thing
Emily Bender, a linguist at the University of Washington, has developed a thought experiment she calls the octopus test. It involves an octopus learning to copy patterns in human writing and produce squiggles in response. But does the animal actually understand the language or are we merely projecting meaning onto it?
Bender’s octopus is a stand-in for AI systems like ChatGPT. The intelligence we see in these machines is also projected on them by us. The same applies to consciousness: we may claim to see it, but it remains unclear whether it is really there.
Read the full story on the debate over machines with minds.
—Will Douglas Heaven
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Discover where iconic sound effects actually came from in this fabulous audio history.
+ Need a serotonin boost? Then tune into this live puppy cam from Denali National Park.
+ Linux lovers can try 570 extinct operating systems at a new virtual museum.
+ Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” becomes something entirely different in this lightning-fast bass guitar performance.
2026-06-04 18:50:18
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting it is to walk into the courtroom alone.
Lately, like many judges across the US, she has seen a noticeable uptick in such filings. According to a new study that examined 4.5 million federal civil cases from 2005 to 2026, the share of lawsuits brought by self-represented people increased from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025. Within those cases, the number of filings made more than doubled from pre-2023 levels.
Judge Braswell puts that jump down to AI.
“I do correlate that to AI in part because I see AI use,” she says. As a tech-savvy judge who uses AI to vet court documents, she’s learned to recognize how large language models write. She can tell from the prose and at times, hallucinated cases and fabricated quotes.
“I’m also actually seeing better-drafted pleadings,” she says.
But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. Judges are also starting to question what kinds of rights and responsibilities large language models should bear as they step into lawyers’ shoes. For example, they ask whether a chatbot has a duty to provide good advice, as a human lawyer does. And a growing number of lawmakers across the US are starting to grapple with who should pay the price when chatbots dish out bad legal advice.
To test whether AI was driving the increase in lawsuits filed by people without a lawyer, the authors of the study, Anand Shah at MIT and Joshua Levy at the University of Southern California, ran 1,600 randomly sampled court documents through Pangram, a commercial AI-text detector. The share flagged as containing AI-generated writing rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in 2026.
To Judge Braswell, that’s not necessarily a cause for concern. While the surge of AI-assisted filings might be adding to their workloads, she and many other judges find the cases easier to rule on because AI is helping people without legal training better articulate their arguments.
Court documents written by people without lawyers are notoriously hard to decipher. Some arrive as handwritten scrawls bordering on gibberish that judges take a while to decode. However cryptic, judges are required to read them charitably.
These days, Judge Braswell has been churning through motions drafted by AI faster than the ones written by the litigants. “I have to be really careful because some of them contain hallucinations and errors, but I can generally understand what they’re arguing better with AI assistance from them than without it,” she says.
The clearer filings let Judge Braswell hear them better. “If I understand an argument a little bit better, I’m probably going to be able to help a little bit more,” she says.
Online communities are springing up to trade self-help guides on using AI to sue. In December 2024, a viral Reddit post walked immigration applicants through suing the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services over delayed review of their applications: draft a writ of mandamus with Microsoft Copilot, pay a lawyer $150 to polish it, and file in the expedient District of Vermont. Cases filed by people without lawyers in Vermont rose from about 45 a year before 2022 to more than 1,100 in 2024.
Even so, people without lawyers are far more likely to lose their case than people with lawyers, and that’s not changing even with the addition of AI, the study found.
“It turns out that mounting a lawsuit is a complex, multifaceted task. Not all of it is just drafting text,” says Levy.
Judge William Garfinkel, a federal magistrate judge in Connecticut, has served on the bench for three decades, pondering all sorts of questions about lawyers’ relationship with their clients. Lately, he has been wondering whether people’s conversations with chatbots dispensing legal advice should be privileged, the way their conversations with lawyers are.
“You can make a good argument that … conversations with large language models like Claude or ChatGPT or Grok should deserve some protection,” he says.
Courts are starting to grapple with this question. In February, a federal court in Michigan ruled that a self-represented person’s conversations with ChatGPT to prepare her case were work product—legal work that is shielded from the opposing side.
The decision came on the same day a federal court in New York held that documents a criminal defendant had generated using Claude were not privileged attorney-client conversations or work product. The court argued that Claude is not an attorney and that a user has no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality in his communication” with it because AI companies can disclose user data to third parties.
In March, Judge Braswell ruled that a self-represented person’s use of a chatbot should stay off limits. “It is true that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others … collect user data for training and other purposes. But … that does not eliminate all expectations of privacy,” she wrote. Courts have since remained split on the issue.
Some judges are also wondering whether a chatbot, like a lawyer, has a duty to provide good legal advice. Judge Allison Goddard, a federal magistrate judge in California, has noticed that people without lawyers often get the wrong advice from ChatGPT when trying to assess the value of their case during settlement negotiations. In one case, a plaintiff who slipped and fell in a store asked for $700,000 from the store, which was wildly more than the case was worth.
“Where are you getting the idea that you’re getting $700,000? Did you go to ChatGPT?” Judge Goddard asked. “Well …” the plaintiff mumbled. She then walked the person through the law to explain why ChatGPT was wrong and suggested a lower amount. “It’s like Dr. Google went to law school,” she says.
Then there’s the question of who’s liable when a chatbot makes such mistakes. In March, Nippon Life Insurance Company sued OpenAI alleging that ChatGPT practiced law without a license and helped a woman reopen a lawsuit that was already settled, flooding the court with frivolous filings. “ChatGPT is not an attorney,” the lawsuit said.
In May, OpenAI asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that ChatGPT does not practice law. “ChatGPT is not a person and neither has nor uses any degree of legal knowledge or skill,” OpenAI said in its filing. The case is still pending before the court.
States have started to weigh legislation that would hold AI companies liable when their chatbots offer bad legal advice. New York introduced a bill in March that would bar chatbots from impersonating lawyers, even if they notify users that they are interacting with chatbots. In Congress, a series of bills have been proposed to ban chatbots from posing as lawyers, doctors, and other licensed professionals. The bills have yet to gain traction.
For now, people will continue turning to AI to be their lawyer. For many of them, the rewards outweigh the risks. Not long ago, when Judge Braswell asked self-represented litigants why they wanted a particular piece of evidence, they mumbled timidly. Now, they answer her questions confidently, having rehearsed with a chatbot.
“This is a really tough system to navigate. With AI, though, it gets a little less complex,” she says.
2026-06-04 00:51:38
Would you take a payment to ramp down your electricity use? Would it change anything if you were doing so to help power a local data center?
Google just signed a new deal to help pay for a virtual power plant (VPP) in the largest power grid in the US. The agreement is with Voltus, a leading VPP and distributed energy resources platform.
Voltus will set up the virtual power plant, grouping together devices like electric vehicles and smart thermostats. It’ll pay customers to participate, and the company will dial back power or use the stored energy during times when the grid is stressed. Google will foot the bill for setting it up, and the extra capacity generated by the project will help run its data centers in the region.
This is one of the most concrete examples so far of a tech giant using a VPP to help meet energy demand for data centers. But there are still some lingering questions about just how far this sort of program can go, and what the limits are.
Last year, it felt as if everyone was talking about data center flexibility. A high-profile study from Duke University found that if data centers agreed to decrease their energy demand for roughly 40 hours per year, a whole bunch of them (about 100 gigawatts’ worth) could come online without making new power plants or transmission equipment necessary.
The underlying reason is that our power grid is designed not for our average energy use, but for the absolute maximum: the brutally hot July evening when everyone is blasting their air conditioners, watching Love Island, and microwaving popcorn. If a data center is willing to refrain from pulling so much power during those high-stress times, the grid can happily support it the rest of the year.
One lingering question here is about incentives: How would you get data centers to agree to this? After all, they might not have a very flexible load, especially now that AI use is more widespread—training a model can easily be delayed or shifted, but customer demand is more immediate. Giving up computing capacity could mean losing revenue.
Regulation is one approach that could work here. One proposal in the US would allow new data centers to come online years sooner if they agree to lower demand when the grid is nearing its max. And a new Texas law requires large users to switch to backup power or curtail their demand in emergency situations.
Another approach is for data center operators to pay for other people to be flexible.
Voltus announced a new program in September that allows data centers to finance flexibility on their local grid. The company calls it “Bring your own capacity.” Google is now the first named customer taking advantage of this program.
In the new agreement, Voltus will pay people who agree to participate in the virtual power plant. The plant will be part of PJM, the grid that covers much of the US East Coast. The company says it will be able to aggregate up to 100 megawatts of distributed energy resources each year. The plant should be operational in 2027, according to Voltus.
This isn’t Google’s first foray into flexibility; the company has agreements with utilities across the US to limit or shift its own energy demand, which can help free up grid capacity. As the company pointed out in a blog post earlier this year, though, there are limits on how flexible a data center can be, and not every facility will be able to ramp down its power demand.
“There is no one solution for expanding grid capacity and we’re continuing to explore all options, including the many avenues for load flexibility,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s global head of advanced energy, in an emailed statement in response to written questions.
Once again, I’m wondering about incentives here. These companies are asking homes and businesses to be flexible. Will they agree?
A recent study in California looked at local people’s willingness to participate in managed electric-vehicle charging. Essentially, the program pays people to give up control of when they charge their EVs. This is another way to help smooth out electricity demand and ease the burden on the grid.
The problem? Not many people signed up. With no economic incentive, only 1% of EV owners enrolled in managed charging. At $40 per month (about 15% of their power bill), only 4.6% did.
This is a different situation and a different region from the one in which Google is working with Voltus. (It’s worth noting that the companies aren’t sharing how much they plan to pay the participants, which will obviously be a big determinant in participation for this kind of project.)
But this study shows that even with money on the table, people may not always jump at the chance to cede control of their electricity demand. And it certainly feels relevant that about 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers in their area, according to recent Gallup polling.
Being flexible sounds like a great idea in theory, and these financed VPPs could provide an immediate route to meeting energy demand. But as we move from idea to implementation, it’ll be interesting to see whether trial runs work as intended.
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
2026-06-03 20:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Less than two weeks after scrapping an executive order on AI, President Donald Trump signed a new one on Tuesday. Promising to promote innovation and security, the policy represents a turning point in the White House’s AI governance—but is likely to attract criticism from both opponents and supporters of stricter regulation. Here are five key points from the order:
1. It’s created a voluntary review system: tech companies will be asked to share frontier models with the government for review 30 days before they plan to release them.
2. There’s no mandatory licensing: the government will not require permits before software can be deployed.
3. It establishes a dedicated AI cybersecurity clearinghouse: the new hub will coordinate security checks with the private sector.
4. It’s a watered-down version of the order Trump shelved last month: the earlier version requested models 90 days before their release.
5. But it’s still a move towards stronger AI oversight: the policy marks a clear departure from the White House’s previous hands-off approach.
Plus: here’s why a previous Trump administration’s AI policy was a distraction and how AI is already making online crimes easier.
The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands.
Quay Barnett, who leads the effort at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, aims to optimize “the human as a weapons system.” His vision is cyborg-inspired: drones and soldiers will see together, share information seamlessly, and make decisions as one.
—James O’Donnell
This is our latest story to be turned into an MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which we publish each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 President Trump has signed an AI order that expands model oversight
The long-awaited executive order aims to mitigate security threats. (NYT $)
+It asks companies to submit models voluntarily for tests before release. (NPR)
+ It’s a slimmed-down version of the order Trump shelved in May. (WSJ $)
+ And marks a strategic shift in his AI strategy. (Reuters $)
+ A war over AI regulation is coming to the US. (MIT Technology Review)
2 SpaceX plans to raise $75 billion in IPO at $135 per share
The company intends to sell 555.6 million shares. (Reuters $)+ The fixed price breaks from the traditional IPO process. (Bloomberg $)
+ Morningstar says the valuation should be nearly 50% lower. (BI)
3 Meta has scaled back plans to track workers’ clicks and keystrokes to train AI
All staff can pause it for 30 minutes, with some fully exempt.(The Information $)
+ The changes follow a fierce backlash to the tracking plans. (Reuters $)
+ AI is supercharging surveillance. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Microsoft wants to ‘make users addicted’ to its new AI assistant
According tointernal documents for the “Scout” tool. (404 Media)
+ Microsoft launched the assistant on Tuesday. (TechCrunch)
5 Mathematicians fear that AI threatens their field
A new declaration raises concerns about AI’s trustworthiness. (Ars Technica)
+ It arrives a week after OpenAI said it solved a famous math problem. (WSJ $)
+ A startup wants to change how mathematicians do math. (MIT Technology Review)
6 Scientists have found a way to supercharge computer worms with AI
The worm could target any known flaw in the world’s computers. (NYT $)
+ AI supercharging scams. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Google must let UK publishers opt out of AI search features
Online publishers can choose not to appear in the AI Overviews. (BBC)
+ Google is now testing features for sites to exit AI search. (Reuters $)
8 America’s data center build-out is falling way behind schedule
60% of those planned for completion in 2027 aren’t yet under construction. (WSJ $)
+ Nobody wants a data center in their backyard. (MIT Technology Review)
9 EVs are getting cheaper worldwide—except in the US
The US is short on supportive policies and affordable Chinese EVs. (Rest of World)
10 The European Parliament is ditching Google for… Quant
The French search engine is the new default on in-house computers. (Politico)
+ The switch comes amid a broader push to wean the EU off US tech. (FT $)
Quote of the day
—Dan Coatsworth, head of markets at AJ Bell, tells CNBC that SpaceX’s IPO price looks overloaded with expectations.
One More Thing
Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street.
Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make Marseille residents more aware that they’re being watched. She’s part of a growing group of activists resisting the rise of policing cameras in their hometown.
Find out how the rebellious port city of Marseille is fighting the surveillance state.
—Fleur Macdonald
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ These aerial photos of solar farms transform renewable energy into abstract art.
+ Open a window over Earth’s water with this hypnotic 4K atmospheric film made from satellite imagery.
+ Spend three relaxing hours with David Attenborough narrating this collection of extraordinary wildlife moments.
+ Radiohead sounds beautiful on traditional Japanese instruments in this koto performance of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”.
2026-06-02 20:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
From accounting to design to market research and product development, there’s a staggering breadth of skills needed to run a business. Large companies can hire experts to handle these tasks, but small businesses don’t always have that luxury.
That’s where AI comes in. Today’s models can already take on a range of basic administrative work, from organizing notes and summarizing meetings to invoicing, goal-setting, and social media planning. Find out how small-business owners can put AI to work.
—Peter Hall
This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Anthropic has confidentially filed for IPO ahead of OpenAI
It aims to go public as early as this fall. (CNN)
+ The company did not disclose its target valuation. (Guardian)
+ It’s expected to list shortly after a trillion-dollar IPO by SpaceX. (BBC)
+ Beating OpenAI in the IPO race could have a big impact. (WSJ $)
2 The EU may exclude US cloud giants from critical contracts
The likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google could be shut out. (Reuters $)
+ The EU aims to reduce its dependence on US tech. (FT $)
+ Trump supercharged this sovereignty push. (Politico $)
3 Florida has become the first state to sue OpenAI
The lawsuit targets ChatGPT’s alleged child safety risks. (NPR)
+ Florida says OpenAI put profit ahead of safety. (Reuters $)
+ Chatbots are now starting to check user ages. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Hackers stole Instagram accounts just by asking Meta AI for them
They easily broke into a host of celebrity profiles. (404 Media)
+ The exploit shows the risk of offloading support to AI. (TechCrunch)
+ AI is making online crimes easier. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Chinese universities with military ties are seeking Nvidia chips
Two are blacklisted by the US Commerce Department. (Bloomberg $)
+ The Chinese military has sought restricted Nvidia chips for years. (NYT $)
+ US senators have slammed a loophole in chip export rules. (Reuters $)
6 Blue Origin and NASA disagree on a crucial rocket’s next flight
+ Blue Origin says the rocket will fly again this year. (Engadget)+ But NASA is less optimistic. (CNBC)+ The rocket’s failure cast doubt on NASA’s moon plans. (BBC)
7 Moderna has won funding to develop an Ebola mRNA vaccine
The CEPI has pledged over $60 million to the effort. (Ars Technica)
+ To fight an outbreak raging out of control. (MIT Technology Review)
8 China is using AI to predict future political dissent
A company called Geedge Networks is developing the tech. (NYT $)
9 Geoengineering can thicken Arctic ice, but melt results are mixed
Trials show the tech has had a limited impact. (New Scientist $)
10 Top AI labs are expanding research into machine ‘consciousness’
Meta, Anthropic, and DeepMind are increasing their investments. (FT $)
+ A new tool could show how consciousness works. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
—Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier tells reporters why his state is suing OpenAI, the LA Times reports.
One More Thing
Cryonics is best known for its appearance in sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But its adherents have held on to a dream that advances in medicine will one day allow for resuscitation and additional years on Earth.
Around 500 people are preserved in liquid nitrogen globally, while another 4,000 are on waiting lists. Despite scant evidence that cryonics can work, believers remain optimistic that future science could eventually revive them.
Discover why the hope of human reanimation refuses to die.
—Laurie Clarke
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)
+ Hear Dolly Parton reimagined through this spot-on Dire Straits-style cover of “Jolene”.
+ Find out which birds people search for most in this interactive visualization of bird popularity.
+ Explore thousands of Q&As between students and astronauts on the ISS at this interactive site.
+ Paris’s oldest bridge disappeared beneath a giant inflatable cave in this surreal public art installation.
2026-06-02 19:23:34
The global health care sector is under increasing strain.
Decades of chronic underinvestment and constraints in recruitment have coincided with a surge in demand for services for aging populations. Gaps in provision are already taking a toll, with fragmented access to care and high rates of stress and burnout among staff. And it’s getting worse. The World Health Organization has warned that current shortfalls will increase to 11 million workers by 2030.
In their urgent hunt for a solution, many health-care providers are now pinning their hopes on agentic AI, with more than two-thirds (68%) having already adopted AI agents into their workforce, according to KPMG.
The technology is being deployed to automate complex back-office processes, collaborate with medical teams, and even triage patients, all in a bid to reduce the cognitive load on clinicians and improve quality of care for patients as the supply of human health-care workers dwindles.
Until now, the benefits of digitalization within health care have been limited.
Many staff have blamed slow or outdated technology for adding to the administrative burden rather than alleviating it. For example, U.S. patient data was migrated to electronic health records (EHRs) in the early 2000s, but this data remains fragmented and reliant on manual inputs.
New telehealth services and digital care tools, like remote monitors, have had similar shortcomings, says Ashis Barad, MD, chief digital and technology officer at Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), an academic medical center in New York that focuses on musculoskeletal health. Both technologies have helped improve access to health care by removing geographical barriers, he says, but they’ve failed to replicate the quality of in-person care or win trust from patients.
Agentic AI is different from these existing technologies, he insists.
Rather than relying on manual inputs or defaulting to human workers for any case that sits slightly outside a rigid framework, AI agents can handle nuanced, complex scenarios. They can make autonomous decisions, retrieve information from expert clinical sources, and iterate over time, freeing clinicians to focus on higher-level patient care. As Dr. Barad puts it: “Agentic AI takes your workflow and collapses it, augments it, supercharges it, and makes it more performant.”
At HSS, AI agents have already been deployed in multiple areas. They handle complex backend processes, such as insurance claims that previously took several weeks to complete and involved both HSS staff and a third-party contractor to handle the volume. Now, says Dr. Barad, AI agents complete 1,100 claims per month. They’ve reduced the appeals stage from 45 minutes to five and improved the success rate of those appeals from 65% to 100% in the nine months since implementation. HSS now handles all claims in-house.
Building on that success, HSS is now deploying AI agents in non-clinical patient-facing settings with an AI scheduling and triage service, as part of a collaboration with enterprise agentic AI developer Ema Unlimited. The service is accessible 24/7 via web, text, or phone. It uses conversational AI to ask patients clarifying questions about their condition and then books appointments with the most appropriate clinician, factoring in location, insurance coverage, and physician availability. “It completes the whole loop,” says Dr. Barad. The AI agent is trained on “all of our context, all of our rules, and all of our knowledge base,” he adds, providing patients with streamlined access to highly specialist knowledge from world-leading surgeons.
Given the high-stakes decisions delegated to AI agents, the triage service has built-in safeguards—sensitive, complex, or uncertain scenarios are escalated to human specialists. Every decision made by the AI agent is auditable and human staff can step in at any point. Patient data is kept secure and the system is trained on all HSS protocols, policies, and care pathways. By keeping humans in the loop, Ema says its technology strikes the balance between efficient automation, patient-first safety, and human-informed decision making.
As the technology becomes more prolific, it will be incumbent on providers to ensure they have these sorts of guardrails embedded into systems, says Dr. Barad. At HSS all decisions around the technology are filtered through an AI subcommittee that Dr. Barad co-chairs alongside a senior nursing executive. AI agents that may touch on patient care will be scrutinized with far more rigor than, say, backend processes, he explains.
For example, Dr. Barad has plans to create a dedicated AI lab at the HSS main campus in New York City—a move that aims to democratize access to the technology across the organization. It will be open to all staff looking to understand or build AI agents, he explains, with informative classes and one-on-one training. “We’re getting agentic AI into everybody’s hands,” he says. This echoes research by Deloitte, which found that leading agentic AI adopters in health care were far more likely to have opted for multiagent solutions, redesigning end-to-end workflows rather than sticking to narrow solutions or individual use cases.
The key, it appears, is to integrate AI agents across the entire enterprise, treating them as a general-purpose technology. As Dr. Barad puts it: “It’s wrong to think of agentic AI in use cases… It’s a general-purpose technology, analogous to electricity.”
In practice, this means health-care providers need to set the right foundation to achieve value with agentic AI. This includes creating a unified data strategy, one that integrates fragmented data sources across an organization to create a single, comprehensive source of truth. In health care, data is often split across multiple departments and providers, each with their own legacy IT system.
In systems that rely on fragmented data sources, metrics often lack standardized definitions too. For example, Dr. Barad says that each hospital he’s worked in has had a slightly different definition for “time to start surgery,” a metric commonly used to gauge operating room efficiency. This level of fragmentation impedes AI agents from retrieving information from different sources or applications and assimilating the tacit knowledge that differentiates them from other technologies.
By creating greater interoperability of data at HSS, patient-facing AI agents can draw from a patient’s clinical care history and existing recommendations from their clinician, combine this information with current symptoms, and decide whether a situation requires escalation before notifying the correct specialist and informing the patient.
For Dr. Barad, the potential for AI agents to overhaul health care and alleviate the current pressures on resources, access, and patient care is huge.
He envisions a future in which 90% of non-clinical health-care tasks could be administered by AI agents, freeing clinicians up for what he calls white-glove work, meaning the most complex, specialized, and sensitive cases.
Most health-care providers seem equally optimistic. According to research by KPMG, 84% of providers are already comfortable handing decision making about specific processes over to AI agents.
“We’re spending so much time on keyboards and computers right now that we’re actually not doing what we should be doing,” says Dr. Barad. “This is going to rehumanize health care.”
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
