Put patients at the centre of medical AI governance

Kyle Lam and his co-authors classify medical artificial intelligence according to autonomy, automation and operational scope, three properties that form a useful basis for setting regulatory and liability boundaries across capability levels (see K. Lam et al. Nature 655, 1129–1132; 2026). They mention informed consent, yet their framework remains centred on allocating responsibility to clinicians, health-care organizations, device manufacturers and regulators. Patient rights receive no systematic place in its design.

Nature 657, 566 (2026)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-02796-8

Related Articles

• When physicians and AI work together, who is accountable? How to lay out medical liability

• Train clinical AI to reason like a team of doctors

• Medical AI can transform medicine — but only if we carefully track the data it touches

• See more letters to the editor

Subjects

Latest on:

• Health care
• Machine learning
• Ethics

• Limit bets on clinical-trial outcomes being placed on prediction markets

  Correspondence 08 SEP 26

• 

  Immune therapy engineered inside the body eases multiple sclerosis

  News 03 SEP 26

• 

  Weight-loss drug slows ageing in female mice

  News & Views 02 SEP 26

• 

  Anthropic AI ‘formalizes’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem in just 11 days

  News 07 SEP 26

• When AI does science, who is accountable for mistakes?

  Correspondence 01 SEP 26

• 

  Who is responsible when AI helps to write science?

  Comment 01 SEP 26

• Limit bets on clinical-trial outcomes being placed on prediction markets

  Correspondence 08 SEP 26

• 

  Two children died from gene therapies in China: where the field goes next

  News 08 SEP 26

• China’s regulatory innovation for new biomedical technologies

  Correspondence 01 SEP 26