Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an AI guy. Last week, during a stop in Nashville on his Take Back Your Health tour, the Health and Human Services secretary brought up the technology between condemning ultra-processed foods and urging Americans to eat protein. “My agency is now leading the federal government in driving AI into all of our activities,” he declared. An army of bots, Kennedy said, will transform medicine, eliminate fraud, and put a virtual doctor in everyone’s pocket.

RFK Jr. has talked up the promise of infusing his department with AI for months. “The AI revolution has arrived,” he told Congress in May. The next month, the FDA launched Elsa, a custom AI tool designed to expedite drug reviews and assist with agency work. In December, HHS issued an “AI Strategy” outlining how it intends to use the technology to modernize the department, aid scientific research, and advance Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again campaign. One CDC staffer showed us a recent email sent to all agency employees encouraging them to start experimenting with tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. (We agreed to withhold the names of several HHS officials we spoke with for this story so they could talk freely without fear of professional repercussions.)

But the full extent to which the federal health agencies are going all in on AI is only now becoming clear. Late last month, HHS published an inventory of roughly 400 ways in which it is using the technology. At face value, the applications do not seem to amount to an “AI revolution.” The agency is turning to or developing chatbots to generate social-media posts, redact public-records requests, and write “justifications for personnel actions.” One usage of the technology that the agency points to is simply “AI in Slack,” a reference to the workplace-communication platform. A chatbot on RealFood.gov, the new government website that lays out Kennedy’s vision of the American diet, promises “real answers about real food” but just opens up xAI’s chatbot, Grok, in a new window. Many applications seem, frankly, mundane: managing electronic-health records, reviewing grants, summarizing swathes of scientific literature, pulling insights from messy data. There are multiple IT-support bots and AI search tools.