Doctors and NHS could be sued for mistakes made by AI tools, report warns

Doctors and the NHS could be sued for medical negligence over mistakes made by artificial intelligence tools used in diagnosing patients and suggesting their treatment, ministers are being warned.

Under the law as it stands, medics and the health service can be held liable for patients being harmed or dying even if it was AI that made the errors that resulted in their suffering.

The Medical Protection Society, which represents doctors accused of wrongdoing, says in a report that medics could become the “liability sink” – a target of clinical negligence lawsuits – for mistakes made by AI unless the law is overhauled.

The NHS is using AI for more and more purposes, including to analyse scans and X-rays, generate summaries of doctors’ conversations with patients, and draft letters to patients.

“The law has always struggled to keep up with technological change. But with AI, the pace of change is so rapid that this gap feels less like a step and more like a widening gulf,” said Dr Sarah Townley, the MPS’s deputy medical director.

Giving an example of potential harm from AI errors, the MPS said AI could miss a tumour in a patient’s lung when reading an X-ray of their chest. This could result in the patient dying because the false reassurance from the AI would mean no treatment would be given and the cancer could then spread.

Similarly, a patient could need surgery and treatment in intensive care for severe bleeding if an AI wrongly recommended increasing their dose of warfarin, a blood thinner used to treat the heart condition atrial fibrillation.

In such scenarios there was a real and significant risk that a claim would be brought against a doctor in relation to the use of AI tools, the MPS said. “Under the current product liability framework in the UK, there is a risk that clinical negligence claims could be brought against the clinicians in these cases and that they would be held wholly liable,” it warns.

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Source: The Guardian, 9 June 2026