New York — the US Department of Health and Human Services It announced Thursday that it is supercharging Use of artificial intelligence To monitor how states and other recipients of federal health dollars review their programs. This step aims to Reducing fraud risks And save government money.
The department will use ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools to analyze audit reports from all 50 states on an ongoing basis, said Gustave Chiarello, assistant secretary for fiscal resources who is leading the new program.
“It’s classic big government: everyone files an audit, it happens loudly and no one does anything about it,” Chiarello said in an interview. “Here, with AI, we are able to dig deeper.”
The move builds on the administration’s embrace of generative AI to investigate state Medicaid programs and automate administrative and text-editing tasks. AI tools can be a powerful aid in finding patterns or problems across large documents, but critics say the government should use them with caution because they frequently make mistakes and can have unintended biases.
Trump administration and Vice President J.D. Vance Anti-Fraud Task Force They have spent recent months strengthening efforts to eliminate fraud in the Medicaid and Medicare programs as well as in student loan applications and other areas. Those efforts also included using artificial intelligence technology to identify potential fraud, Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson recently said on Fox News.
States and local governments, nonprofits and higher education institutions that spend at least $1 million in federal funds annually are required to submit annual audits. The new initiative will use artificial intelligence to analyze those audits from programs funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, including state Medicaid programs, recipients of federal grants in research, addiction services and more, Chiarello said.
Recipients who do not submit or resolve required reports may face loss of funding. The initiative was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Critics have criticized the administration’s anti-fraud efforts, noting that most of them targeted democratic countries and sometimes reflected a tendency to attack first and gather facts later. On at least one occasion, the administration admitted this to the Associated Press Made a big mistake In the data I used to help justify the New York Medicaid fraud investigation.
Asked about safeguards against AI tools making mistakes, Chiarello noted that officials were evaluating public reports rather than revealing new information. He said the tools aim to make grant recipients better stewards of federal dollars.
Rob Weissman, co-chair of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said he doesn’t think the administration is seriously concerned about fraud, nor does he trust it to use AI tools in a fair and nonpartisan manner.
“The AI is misplaced when you evaluate their actual goals, not what they pretend to be,” he said.
HHS said it has sent letters to governors and treasurers in all 50 states alerting them to the new initiative.
“This letter serves as formal notification that HHS will no longer treat chronic audit noncompliance, recurring deficiencies, material weaknesses, or delinquent audit engagements as matters that may remain unresolved through indefinite informal follow-up,” read one letter reviewed by the AP.
Chiarello said he has been in contact with his counterparts in other federal departments in hopes they will follow suit.
“It will be fairly easy for other agencies to use our technology and benefit from it,” he said.
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Associated Press writer Jeff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey, contributed to this report.