When health systems and policymakers think about designing AI for the clinic—slow, controlled, locked inside compliance and limited scope of a clinical encounter. Technology companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft, on the other hand, thinks about “users”—scaling fast, collecting data first, and asking forgiveness never. And right in that no-man’s land sit patients, who are using AI every day without rights, safety nets, or protections. They’re treated as neither full citizens of the clinic nor valued customers of tech—just data streams to be mined. That gap is where harm festers, safety issues linger, where trust collapses, and where the most vulnerable are left to carry the risk alone.
