As almost everybody knows, the AI gold rush is upon us. And in few fields is it happening as fast and furiously as in healthcare.

That points to an important corollary: Beware.

Artificial intelligence technology has helped radiologists identify anomalies in images that human users have missed. It has some evident benefits in relieving doctors of the back-office routines that consume hours better spent treating patients, such as filing insurance claims and scheduling appointments.

But it has also been accused of providing erroneous information to surgeons during operations that placed their patients at grave risk of injury, and fomenting panic among users who take its offhand responses as serious diagnoses.

The commercial direct-to-consumer applications being promoted by AI firms, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health and Anthropic’s Claude for Healthcare — both of which were introduced in January — raise special concerns among medical professionals. That’s because they’ve been pitched to users who may not appreciate their tendency to output erroneous information errors and offer inappropriate advice.

“Eventually, a lot of this stuff is going to be great, but we’re not there yet,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist associated with Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla.

“The fact that they’re putting these out without enough anchoring in safety and quality and consistency concerns me,” Topol says. “They need much tighter testing. The problem I have is that these efforts are largely stemming from commercial interests — there’s furious competition to be the first to come out with an app for patients, even if it’s not quite ready yet.”

That was the experience reported by Washington Post technology columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler, who provided ChatGPT with 10 years of health data compiled by his Apple Watch — and received a warning about his cardiac health so dire that it sent him to his cardiologist, who told him he was in the bloom of health.

Fowler also sought out Topol, who reviewed the data and found the Chatbot’s warning to be “baseless.” Anthropic’s chatbot also provided Fowler with a health grade that Topol deemed dubious.

“Claude is designed to help users understand and organize their health information, framing responses as general health information rather than medical advice,” an Anthropic spokesman told me by email. “It can provide clinical context—for example, explaining how a lab value compares to diagnostic thresholds—while clearly stating that formal diagnosis requires professional evaluation.”

OpenAI didn’t respond to my questions about the safety and reliability of its consumer app.

Topol, who has written extensively about advanced technology in medicine, is nothing like an AI skeptic. He calls himself an AI optimist, citing numerous studies showing that artificial intelligence can help doctors treat patients more effectively and even to improve their bedside manners.

But he cautions that “healthcare can’t tolerate significant errors. We have to minimize the errors, the hallucinations, the confabulations, the BS and the sycophancy” that AI technology commonly displays.

In medicine, as in many other fields, AI looks to have been oversold as a labor-saving technology. According to a study of AI-equipped stethoscopes provided to about 100 British medical groups published earlier this month in the Lancet, the British medical journal, the high-tech stethoscopes effectively identified some (but not all) indications of heart failure better than conventional stethoscopes. But 40% of the groups abandoned the new devices during the 12-month period of the study.

The main complaint was the “additional workflow burden” experienced by the users — an indication that whatever the virtues of the new technology, they didn’t outweigh the time and effort needed to use them.

Other studies have found that AI can augment physicians’ skills — when the doctors have learned to trust their AI tools and when they’re used in relatively uncomplicated, even generic, conditions.

The most notable benefits have been found in radiology; according to a Dutch study published last year, radiologists using AI to help interpret breast X-rays did as well in finding cancers as two radiologists working together. That suggested that judicious use of AI could free up time for one of the two radiologists. But in this case as in others, the AI helper didn’t do consistently well.

“AI misses some breast cancers that are recalled by human assessment,” a study author said, “but detects a similar number of breast cancers otherwise missed by the interpreting radiologists.”

AI’s incursion into healthcare even has become something of a cultural touchstone: In HBO’s up-to-the-minute emergency room series “The Pitt,” beleaguered ER doctors discover that an AI app pushed on them as a time-saving charting tool has “hallucinated” a history of appendicitis for a patient, endangering the patient’s treatment.

“Generative AI is not perfect,” the app’s sponsor responds. “We still need to proofread every chart it creates” — thus acknowledging, accurately, that AI can increase, not relieve, users’ workloads.

A future in which robots perform surgical operations or make accurate diagnoses remains the stuff of science fiction. In medicine, as elsewhere, AI technology has been shown to be useful to take over automatable tasks from humans, but not in situations requiring human ingenuity or creativity — or precision. And attempts to use AI-related algorithms to make healthcare judgments have been challenged in court.

In a class-action lawsuit filed in Minnesota federal court in 2023, five Medicare patients and survivors of three others allege that UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest medical insurer, relied on an AI algorithm to deny coverage for their care, “overriding their treating physicians’ determinations as to medically necessary care based on an AI model” with a 90% error rate.

The case is pending. In its defense, UnitedHealth has asserted that decisions on whether to approve or deny coverage remain entirely in the hands of physicians and other clinical professionals the company employs, and their decisions on coverage and care comply with Medicare standards.

The AI algorithm cited by the plaintiffs, UnitedHealth says, is not used “to deny care to members or to make adverse medical necessity coverage determinations,” but rather to help physicians and patients “anticipate and plan for future care needs.” The company didn’t address the plaintiffs’ assertion about the algorithm’s error rate.

“We shouldn’t be complacent about accepting errors” from AI tools, Topol told me. But it’s proper to wonder whether that message has been absorbed by promoters of AI health applications.

Disclaimers warning that AI responses “are not professionally vetted or a substitute for medical advice” have all but disappeared from AI platforms, according to a survey by researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

The issue becomes more urgent as the language of chatbots becomes more sophisticated and fluent, inspiring unwarranted confidence in their conclusions, the researchers cautioned. “Users may misinterpret AI-generated content as expert guidance,” they wrote, “potentially resulting in delayed treatment, inappropriate self-care, or misplaced trust in non-validated information.”

Typically, state laws require that medical diagnoses and clinical decisions proceed from physical examinations by licensed doctors and after a full workup of a patient’s medical and family history. They don’t necessarily rule out doctors’ use of AI to help them develop diagnoses or treatment plans, but the doctors must remain in control.

The Food and Drug Administration exempts medical devices from government licensing if they’re “intended generally for patient education, and … not intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions. That may cover AI bots if they’re not issuing diagnoses.

But that may not help users who have willingly uploaded their medical histories and test results to AI bots, unaware of concerns, including whether their information will be kept private or used against them in insurance decisions. Gaps in their uploaded data my affect the advice they receive from bots. And because the bots know nothing except the content they’ve been fed, their healthcare outputs may reflect cultural biases in the basic data, such as ethnic disparities in disease incidence and treatment.

“If there’s a mistake with all your data, you could get into a pretty severe anxiety attack,” Topol says. “Patients should verify, not just trust” what they’ve heard from a bot.

Topol warns that the negative effect of misleading AI information may not only fall on patients, but on the AI field itself. “The public doesn’t really differentiate between individual bots,” he told me. “All we need are some horror stories” about misdiagnoses or dangerous advice, “and that whole area is tarred.”

In his view, that would limit the promise of technologies that could improve the effectiveness of medical practice in many ways. The remedy is for AI applications to be subjected to the same clinical standards applied to “a drug, a device, a diagnostic. We can’t lower the threshold because it’s something new, or different, with some broad appeal.”

The Moreno Valley Mall in Riverside County remained closed Wednesday as owners faced fire safety violations that led the city to shut down most of the vast retail center.

The sprawling indoor regional mall is a centerpiece of Moreno Valley serving customers from Riverside and San Bernardino counties. It was built in 1992 on the former site of Riverside International Raceway, once considered one of the finest automotive racing tracks in the country and a regular draw across Southern California for decades before it closed in 1989.

On Feb. 19, city officials “red-tagged” the mall for the owners’ failure to resolve a multitude of unresolved issues related to its fire protection systems.

The owners said they are “working hard to end this interruption.”

Portions of the two-level, 1.1-million-square-foot mall were deemed unsafe by county and state fire inspectors who recommended the city shut them down “until all live-saving measures are addressed,” the city said in a statement.

Department stores Macy’s and JCPenney are independently owned buildings at the mall with appropriately maintained fire protection systems that are separate from the mall’s systems, allowing them to stay open, the city said.

The16-screen Harkins Theatres movie cineplex is also open.

City Councilwoman Elena Baca-Santa Cruz told the Riverside Press-Enterprise that the mall has “hundreds of violations,” though nine of them are preventing it from reopening.

“For example, there’s no backup generator. If there was a power failure, the whole place will go dark, and that’s a safety violation,” Baca-Santa Cruz said last week.

The owners of the mall, IGP Business Group, did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but owner Matt Ilbak said in a recent Instagram post that a new generator has been installed. The company has upgraded the fire sprinkler system and is working on resolving “all of the city’s issues.”

Other city complaints about IGP’s operation of the mall were outlined in a January letter to Ilbak that cited fire code violations and also complained about “property maintenance violations” that included severely cracked pavement and curbing, as well as dead plants outside. The mall had insufficient exterior lighting, the city said, and graffiti resulting from deferred or neglected maintenance.

In Orange County, Westminster Mall, a once-popular shopping center that has been tarnished by graffiti and vandalism since it closed last year, is on track for demolition soon.

It will be replaced with housing, a hotel and some shops and stores, part of a nationwide trend that is seeing outdated, failed malls in high-traffic locations swapped for mixed-use development that typically includes apartments. The process is often lengthy, leaving empty malls in danger of abuse.

Energy affordability was in the spotlight during President Trump’s lengthy and at times rambling State of the Union address Tuesday evening as the president promised to bring down electricity prices in an effort to assuage voter concerns about rising costs.

The president announced a new “ratepayer protection pledge” to shield residents from higher electricity costs in areas where energy-thirsty artificial intelligence data centers are being built. Trump said major tech companies will “have the obligation to provide for their own power needs” under the plan, though the details of what the pledge actually entails remain vague.

“We have an old grid — it could never handle the kind of numbers, the amount of electricity that’s needed, so I am telling them they can build their own plant,” the president said. “They’re going to produce their own electricity … while at the same time, lowering prices of electricity for you.”

The announcement comes as polling shows Americans are dissatisfied with the economy and concerned about the cost of living. Experts on both sides of the political spectrum have said the energy affordability issue could translate to poor outcomes for Republicans in the midterm elections this November, as it did in a few key races in New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia last year.

While Trump has focused on ramping up domestic production of oil, gas and coal, residential electric bills have been soaring — jumping from 15.9 cents per kilowatt-hour in January 2025 on average to 17.2 cents at the end of December, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Through one year into his second term as president, Trump has vastly changed the federal landscape when it comes to energy and the environment, reversing many of the efforts made by the Biden administration to prioritize electrification initiatives and investments in renewable energy via the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Among several changes, Trump’s administration has slashed funding for solar programs, ended federal tax credits for electric vehicles and canceled grants for offshore wind power — even going so far as to try to halt some such projects that were nearing completion along the East Coast.

Trump has also championed fossil fuel production and on Tuesday doubled down on his “drill baby drill” agenda, touting lower gasoline prices, increased production of American oil and new imports of oil from Venezuela.

Many of the president’s efforts are designed to loosen Biden-era regulations that he has said were burdensome, ideologically motivated and expensive for taxpayers.

Trump has taken direct aim at California, which has long been a leader on the environment. Last year, the president moved to block California’s long-held authority to set stricter tailpipe emission standards than the federal government — an ability that helped the state address historical air quality issues and also underpinned its ambitious ban on the sale of new gas-powered cars in 2035.

Trump also slashed $1.2 billion in federal funding for California’s effort to develop clean hydrogen energy while leaving intact funding for similar projects in states that voted for him. In November, his administration announced that it will open the Pacific Coast to oil drilling for the first time in nearly four decades, a move the state vowed to fight.

But perhaps no issue has come across voters’ kitchen tables more than energy affordability.

So far this term, Trump has canceled or delayed enough projects to power more than 14 million homes, according to a tracker from the nonprofit Climate Power. The group’s senior advisor, Jesse Lee, described the president’s data center announcement as a “toothless, empty promise based on backroom deals with his own billionaire donors.”

“Making it worse, Trump is continuing to block clean-energy production across the board — the only sources that can keep up with demand, ensure utility bills don’t keep skyrocketing, and prevent massive new amounts of pollution,” Lee said in a statement.

Earlier this month, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency repealed the endangerment finding, the U.S. government’s 2009 affirmation that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health and the environment, in what officials described as the single largest act of deregulation in U.S. history. The finding formed the foundation for much of U.S. climate policy. The EPA also loosened guidelines around emissions from coal power plants, including mercury and other dangerous pollutants.

The president’s environmental record so far is “written in rollbacks that put the interests of some corporate polluters above the health of everyday Americans,” read a statement from Marc Boom, senior director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group composed of more than 750 former EPA staff members and appointees.

Further, Trump has worked to undermine climate science in general, often describing global warming as a “hoax” or a “scam.” During his first year in office, he fired hundreds of scientists working to prepare the National Climate Assessment, laid off staffers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and dismantled the National Center for Atmospheric Research, one of the world’s leading climate and weather research institutions, among many other efforts.

In all, the administration has taken or proposed more than 430 actions that threaten the environment, public health and the ability to confront climate change, according to a tracker from the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.

The opposition’s choice for a rebuttal speaker is indicative of how seriously it is taking the issue of energy affordability: Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger focused heavily on energy affordability during her campaign against Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears last year, including vows to expand solar energy projects and technologies such as fusion, geothermal and hydrogen. Virginia is home to more than a third of all data centers worldwide.