The American Medical Association released a framework Oct. 29 for assigning liability when clinical AI harms patients, aligning responsibility with each party’s authority and ability to prevent or mitigate harm.
The AMA Center for Digital Health and AI said existing liability frameworks weren’t built for technologies in which physicians, developers and healthcare organizations each control different parts of clinical AI. As a result, physicians can face liability for risks they cannot reasonably prevent, and patients may struggle to obtain remedies.
Under the framework, developers must demonstrate and maintain their products’ safety and effectiveness, and deployers are accountable for how AI is selected, implemented, governed and monitored. Physicians are responsible for the clinical judgment they can meaningfully exercise, and patients should retain avenues for remedies when defective AI or other actionable failures cause harm.
AMA President Willie Underwood III, MD, said clear expectations are needed to “ensure accountability remains with those best positioned to prevent harm.”
An accompanying issue brief says physicians should not be held liable for AI errors they cannot reasonably detect, such as a triage model that deprioritizes a case while the physician sees only a reordered patient list. Physicians should also be free to decline unproven AI without penalty.
The brief calls on health systems, hospitals and practices to maintain processes to select AI tools, validate them locally, monitor performance and pull them when warranted. It also says vendor contracts should not shift responsibility for defects within a developer’s control onto physicians or deployers.
More than one-third of respondents to the AMA’s 2026 Physician Survey on Augmented Intelligence chose clear liability frameworks as the regulatory action most likely to raise their trust in AI.
The AMA called the brief a first step and named six priority areas for future work, including liability for increasingly autonomous AI and automation bias.
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