The Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday it is expanding its use of artificial intelligence to scrutinize audit reports from all 50 states, aiming to detect fraud and waste in federal health spending and save taxpayer money. Gustav Chiarello, the assistant secretary for financial resources who is leading the new program, said the department will use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to continuously examine the audits that states and other recipients of federal health dollars are required to file.
“It’s classic big government: Everyone files an audit and it lands with a thud and no one does anything about it,” Chiarello said in an interview. “Here, with AI, we’re able to dig into it.”
The initiative builds on HHS’s previous adoption of generative AI to investigate state Medicaid programs, automate routine administrative tasks, and edit agency text. The department expects the technology will surface patterns and anomalies across thousands of pages of audit documentation that human reviewers might miss, speeding up fraud detection and recovery.
While administration officials describe the tool as a powerful aid, critics point to well-documented failures of generative AI systems, including outright errors and biased outputs. They argue that deploying such tools to make decisions about federal health spending demands rigorous safeguards, transparency, and human oversight to avoid unfair or inaccurate determinations.