Medical safety laws play catch-up with AI

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Medical safety laws play catch-up with AI

Article Published January 21, 2026

This article originally appeared on the Politico website on January 21, 2026.

By Aaron Mak

Artificial intelligence is promising to remake modern medicine, and now the government must figure out how to regulate it.

Yet hospitals or government agencies are unlikely to have enough staff to continuously check the millions of medical decisions and recommendations an AI tool might make each month. “I kept hearing that this part is actually really hard,” Arfa Rehman, a tech policy fellow at the Aspen Institute, told DFD over email. “Figuring out what to monitor, choosing the right metrics, and building the systems to track them is its own […] challenge.”

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