AI health tech is booming. The cures are not.

Despite billions in investment and genuine computational advances, AI has yet to deliver an FDA-approved drug or a reliable health assistant. In drug discovery, AI compresses early timelines by 30–40% but has not improved the 90% clinical failure rate. On the consumer side, a 2026 Oxford RCT found that real patients using LLMs for symptom assessment performed no better than those using web searches, with correct condition identification in fewer than 34.5% of cases. ECRI ranked AI chatbot misuse as the top health technology hazard of 2026. The honest picture: AI excels at clerical tasks like transcription and imaging triage, but cannot replace clinical reasoning or bypass the irreducible complexity of human biology.