OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Amazon put health and healthcare front and center in latest AI product launches.
Ever since we reported on OpenAI’s recent move into consumer health, it feels like the floodgates have opened when it comes to the big tech firms unveiling significant health-focused AI initiatives. Announcements from Google, Anthropic, and most recently Amazon, demonstrate the huge potential that the world’s leading technology companies see in using AI to advance human health – albeit in quite different ways.
OpenAI, which revealed its technology was already being used by millions of people for health-related questions, took a step toward formalizing that behavior with ChatGPT Health. The product allows users to connect medical records and wellness data, such as information from wearables, and then ask questions grounded in a more personal, longitudinal context.
Through its One Medical division, Amazon this week launched an “agentic health AI assistant” that lives inside its primary care app where it can access members’ complete medical records. The assistant is designed to explain lab results, answer health questions, help decide what kind of care is appropriate and take concrete actions such as booking appointments or managing medication renewals.
With its launch of Claude for Healthcare, Anthropic is not only targeting consumers but also healthcare providers and payers, as it seeks to provide a connective layer across the fragmented landscape of modern health data. Patients can choose to link electronic health records, lab results and fitness data, with an emphasis on translation and preparation: summarizing medical history, explaining a lab report in everyday language, or finding the right questions to ask before an appointment. For clinicians and payers, Anthropic claims Claude can assist with documentation, policy interpretation, regulatory workflows and other areas where the volume and complexity of paperwork continues to grow.
While Google has yet to join the consumer-focused health AI bandwagon (although who would bet against it doing so?) the company announced further progress in an area of healthcare where it has been investing for years: medical imaging. Its recent release of MedGemma 1.5, extends the company’s medical AI work deeper into imaging, with models that can interpret 3D CT and MRI scans alongside whole-slide pathology images. This is all about helping clinical specialists make sense of highly complex visual data at scale, with a focus on assistive decision support: flagging subtle patterns, prioritizing cases and reducing variability across interpretations.
Across all four companies, a common theme is restraint and an insistence on keeping humans in the loop, demonstrating a shared awareness of the risks that come with moving AI closer to real-world care, from errors and overconfidence to regulatory scrutiny and public trust. However, while significant questions remain, what’s clear is that healthcare is no longer a peripheral experiment for the world’s biggest AI players, and has become a core area of focus where technical capabilities, regulatory challenges and human trust are being tested in real time.
