PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY
Doctors are increasingly using artificial-intelligence chatbots to help make clinical decisions, and we wanted to know how relying on their recommendations would hold up to the legal standard of care expected of physicians, in other words, whether following the advice would help avoid medical malpractice. We studied this using real medical malpractice court cases, in which judges have already ruled on what appropriate care should have looked like. We asked fifteen artificial-intelligence systems to act as the doctor in each case and checked whether their advice met the court’s standard. We found that newer and more capable systems gave more legally defensible advice, but that they achieved this by ordering far more tests and referrals, at much higher cost. As hospitals adopt these tools, safer artificial-intelligence advice may therefore substantially increase health-care costs.
Dvir Aran, Ronen Perry and Shahar Shelly, Clinical liability cases reveal a coupling between legal defensibility and medical procedure escalation in large language models, Communications Medicine (2026). Published: 8 August 2026.
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