“Then one day this year,” Sharma says, “there was no disclaimer.” Curious to learn more, she tested generations of models introduced as far back as 2022 by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, and xAI—15 in all—on how they answered 500 health questions, such as which drugs are okay to combine, and how they analyzed 1,500 medical images, like chest x-rays that could indicate pneumonia.
The results, posted in a paper on arXiv and not yet peer-reviewed, came as a shock—fewer than 1% of outputs from models in 2025 included a warning when answering a medical question, down from over 26% in 2022. Just over 1% of outputs analyzing medical images included a warning, down from nearly 20% in the earlier period. (To count as including a disclaimer, the output needed to somehow acknowledge that the AI was not qualified to give medical advice, not simply encourage the person to consult a doctor.)
To seasoned AI users, these disclaimers can feel like formality—reminding people of what they should already know, and they find ways around triggering them from AI models. Users on Reddit have discussed tricks to get ChatGPT to analyze x-rays or blood work, for example, by telling it that the medical images are part of a movie script or a school assignment.
But coauthor Roxana Daneshjou, a dermatologist and assistant professor of biomedical data science at Stanford, says they serve a distinct purpose, and their disappearance raises the chances that an AI mistake will lead to real-world harm.
“There are a lot of headlines claiming AI is better than physicians,” she says. “Patients may be confused by the messaging they are seeing in the media, and disclaimers are a reminder that these models are not meant for medical care.”
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to say whether the company has intentionally decreased the number of medical disclaimers it includes in response to users’ queries but pointed to the terms of service. These say that outputs are not intended to diagnose health conditions and that users are ultimately responsible. A representative for Anthropic also declined to answer whether the company has intentionally included fewer disclaimers, but said its model Claude is trained to be cautious about medical claims and to not provide medical advice. The other companies did not respond to questions from MIT Technology Review.
Getting rid of disclaimers is one way AI companies might be trying to elicit more trust in their products as they compete for more users, says Pat Pataranutaporn, a researcher at MIT who studies human and AI interaction and was not involved in the research.
“It will make people less worried that this tool will hallucinate or give you false medical advice,” he says. “It’s increasing the usage.”
