OpenAI and Anthropic intensify AI race in healthcare sector

Healthcare is quietly becoming one of the first major sectors where frontier labs are battling for end‑to‑end workflows, not just API calls. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Health and OpenAI for Healthcare offerings, combined with Apple Health and medical‑record integrations, aim to make ChatGPT the default interface to your body’s data. Anthropic’s push to position Claude as a tool for accelerating discovery and clinical reasoning sets up a direct rivalry over who becomes the ‘AI operating system’ for doctors and patients.

From an AGI perspective, this domain is uniquely high‑stakes: models are being asked to reason over noisy, multimodal, longitudinal data and to support decisions where both harms and liability are real. That will force labs to invest heavily in evaluation frameworks like HealthBench, safety filters, and fine‑tuning protocols grounded in practitioner feedback rather than benchmarks alone. The upside is that success here could dramatically advance our understanding of how to align powerful models with human values and regulatory constraints. The downside is that a commercial arms race in healthcare may tempt some players to ship capabilities faster than our safety toolkits mature.