The Coalition for Health AI announced a program called PULSE that will place enterprise AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic in 10 US public health jurisdictions. Both companies have donated 10 enterprise licenses with capacity for up to 2,000 public health practitioners, according to AI News. Accenture will handle participant onboarding and help develop playbooks from the trials.
Pilots are scheduled to begin in autumn 2026 with resulting implementation guidance expected in 2027.
Five Use Cases
CHAI’s leadership council will select participating jurisdictions and assign practitioners to communities focused on five defined use cases, according to the announcement: biosurveillance and drug-wave prediction, social determinants of health mapping, operations and community-feedback analysis, multilingual public communications, and automated clinical data retrieval via FHIR query engines.
FHIR is the HL7 standard for electronic healthcare data exchange. The clinical data retrieval use case is the most technically ambitious of the five, though CHAI has not specified whether frontier models will generate queries, retrieve records, summarize returned information, or combine those functions.
Open Questions on Governance
The AI News report identifies several gaps in the published program details. CHAI has not published separate evaluation, privacy, security, or human-review requirements for the five use cases. The announcement does not define retention periods, access controls, audit arrangements, or rules governing protected health information.
Whether HIPAA applies will depend on the specific agency, the data involved, and the function being performed. Some use cases, particularly biosurveillance and clinical data retrieval, could involve demographic, geographic, or clinical information. CHAI has not stated whether pilots will use identifiable records, de-identified data, synthetic data, or aggregated datasets.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic state that inputs and outputs from their commercial products are not used for model training by default, addressing a key concern for healthcare deployments handling sensitive data.
Scale and Eligibility
Eligible participants include state and territorial health departments, county and municipal agencies, tribal authorities, Indian health organizations, and large city health departments. Data cited by CHAI from the National Association of County and City Health Officials showed that nearly 40% of local health departments were not using AI.
“Every major technological transformation succeeds or fails based on trust, governance and execution,” Dr. David Lakey, a former Texas health commissioner, told AI News.
“We believe AI should be useful, safe and accessible to the people tackling society’s most important challenges,” Felipe Millon, OpenAI’s head of government go-to-market, said.
Elizabeth Kelly, Anthropic’s head of beneficial deployments, said PULSE would allow practitioners to “test the tools in their own environments with privacy, governance, and responsible-use measures incorporated from the start.”
Government AI Adoption Context
PULSE is the most structured public-sector AI deployment program announced to date from either OpenAI or Anthropic. Previous government-adjacent AI initiatives have been pilot-scale or research-oriented. This program differs in its operational scope: 10 jurisdictions, five defined use cases, dedicated onboarding infrastructure, and a stated goal of producing reusable playbooks for the broader public health system.
The program also serves a competitive function for both companies. Government healthcare contracts carry long procurement cycles and high switching costs. Establishing reference deployments in public health now positions both providers for the larger federal and state healthcare AI contracts expected as agencies formalize their AI strategies.