AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.
Experts claim artificial intelligence may have played a central and undisclosed role in crafting the White House’s marquee health policy document after finding a telltale footprint embedded directly in the text.
The “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) Report, led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and published earlier this week by the newly-established Make America Healthy Again Commission, raised alarm after the report cited multiple studies and authors that don’t appear to be real.
Now, AI researchers, speaking with The Washington Post, flagged the presence of “oaicite” markers, a technical signature linked to OpenAI’s tools, in multiple footnotes.
The “oaicite” tag, visible in URLs throughout some of the report’s 522 citations, is a backend identifier generated by AI systems like ChatGPT when referencing sources. Its presence is considered a “definitive sign” that artificial intelligence was used to compile or generate parts of the report’s scientific citations, researchers told the newspaper.
“This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,” said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “It cannot be used for any policymaking. It cannot even be used for any serious discussion, because you can’t believe what’s in it.”
Experts say the report, which attempts to explain declining life expectancy in the U.S., includes multiple examples of botched sourcing in the form of fabricated studies, dead links, and articles misattributed to nonexistent authors. Many of the issues appear to stem from AI “hallucinations,” a common flaw in large language models that generate plausible but false content.
Oren Etzioni, a prominent AI scholar at the University of Washington, said the misuse of such tools was unacceptable.
“Frankly, that’s shoddy work,” he said. “We deserve better.”
The White House updated the report multiple times Thursday to quietly scrub AI-related identifiers, according to The Washington Post. One “oaicite” tag tied to a Wirecutter story remained until Thursday evening. Another, referencing a nonexistent study on asthma, was replaced after NOTUS first reported problems with the report’s sourcing.