STAT published my letter on Rao and Succi’s “shadow medical system” essay. They had closed with IBM’s 1979 line that a computer can never be held accountable, so it must never make a management decision — but that rule ended in 2018 when AI took out its first malpractice policy.

Medicine has a well-established model for distributing liability across physicians and tools: whoever caused the failure bears the liability. AI vendors have quietly opted out of it — and the contracts they're asking health systems to sign reflect that.