The Trump administration expands its use of AI in the hunt for healthcare fraud

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday announced it is supercharging its use of artificial intelligence to police how states and other recipients of federal health dollars are auditing their programs. The move is intended to tamp down risks of fraud and save the government money.

The department will use ChatGPT and other AI tools to analyze audit reports from all 50 states on an ongoing basis, said Gustav Chiarello, the assistant secretary for financial resources who is leading the new program.

“It’s classic big government: Everyone files an audit and it lands with a thud and no one does anything about it,” Chiarello said in an interview. “Here, with AI, we’re able to dig into it.”

The move builds on the department’s embrace of generative AI for investigating state Medicaid programs, automating administrative tasks and editing text. AI tools can be a powerful aid in finding patterns or problems across large documents, but critics say the government should use them with caution because they frequently make mistakes and can have unintended biases.

The Trump administration and Vice President JD Vance’s anti-fraud task force have spent recent months promoting efforts to crack down on fraud in the Medicaid and Medicare programs as well as in student loan applications and other areas. Those efforts have also involved using AI technology to flag likely fraud, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said recently on Fox News.

States, local governments, nonprofits and higher education institutions that spend at least $1 million in federal money a year are required to submit annual audits. The new initiative will use AI to analyze those audits from HHS-funded programs, including state Medicaid programs and federal grantees in research, addiction services and more, Chiarello said.

Recipients that do not file the required reports or resolve problems in them could face a loss of money.

Critics have blasted the…

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