KFF: CMS Slack gave AI firms a direct line to health officials
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 9 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra162 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5101 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash192 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7131 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 101 days before it.
Key facts
- Published Oct 9, 2026 by KFF Health News, republished by CBS News; based on thousands of Slack messages, meeting transcripts and video recordings
- The CMS Slack workspace started in August 2025 under Amy Gleason (former acting DOGE administrator, now chief product officer of CMS’s Office of Health Technology and Products); about 1,700 members, only a handful of them patient advocates, doctors or hospital representatives
- February 2026: an FDA listening session on conversational AI for patients, with at least 35 industry organizations including Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple and Google, was announced in the Slack rather than on the FDA’s public calendar
- CMS officials suggested in at least two meetings that apps in the new Medicare App Library (about two dozen commercial apps) would be prioritized for a program that reimburses companies for AI chatbot advice or wearable tracking
- Joseph Daval (Harvard Medical School, former FDA lawyer) said the workspace in some ways resembles a federal advisory committee, which must operate in public. CMS declined to answer questions on its legality; the FDA did not respond
- AMA CEO John Whyte: ‘Some of these tools just aren’t ready for primetime… There’s no liability if these tools get things wrong.’
What happened
KFF Health News reported on October 9, 2026 that the Trump administration’s health agencies have given technology and AI companies an unusual channel of influence: a Slack workspace run by CMS (CBS News / KFF Health News1). It has grown to about 1,700 members, mostly from industry and investment firms. Officials used it to invite selected companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, Apple and Google, to a February 2026 FDA listening session on patient-facing chatbots that did not appear on any public calendar. Officials have also told companies that apps in the new Medicare App Library would be favoured in a program that pays for AI health advice.
Why it matters
Federal policy on AI health chatbots, a fast-growing use of models such as ChatGPT and Claude, is partly being shaped in a closed industry channel. Experts quoted by KFF say this may sidestep the rules that make advisory bodies meet in public.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 press
Press
Changes
- Filed (KFF Health News via CBS News)