Doctors could be sued for AI mistakes, NHS warned

TL;DR:

  • The Medical Protection Society warns doctors and the NHS could be sued for negligence over errors made by AI diagnostic and treatment tools.
  • It wants AI reclassified as “products” under the Consumer Protection Act 1987 so developers, not just clinicians, bear liability.
  • The warning lands as the NHS expands AI across scans, note-taking and patient letters.

Doctors and the NHS could be held liable for medical negligence over mistakes made by AI tools, the Medical Protection Society has warned ministers. Under current law, clinicians can be sued even when an AI system caused the error — leaving medics at risk of becoming the “liability sink” for AI failures, the body says in a new report.

An accountability gap widening

The MPS sketches concrete harms: AI missing a tumour on a chest X-ray, leaving cancer untreated; or wrongly recommending a higher warfarin dose, triggering severe bleeding. In both cases, it warns, “clinical negligence claims could be brought against the clinicians” who would be “held wholly liable”. Its remedy is legal reclassification — treating AI tools and systems as products under the Consumer Protection Act 1987, shifting responsibility toward developers and manufacturers. “The law has always struggled to keep up with technological change,” said deputy medical director Dr Sarah Townley. “With AI, the pace of change is so rapid that this gap feels less like a step and more like a widening gulf.”

The timing is sharp. It arrives the same week the government moved to put more than 500,000 NHS staff onto Microsoft Copilot, and as AI already reads scans, summarises consultations and drafts patient letters. NHS Resolution, which handles negligence claims in England, is drafting AI liability guidance, the Department of Health confirmed.

Looking forward

The clinical case for AI is not in dispute; the question is who pays when it errs. The Society for Acute Medicine’s Dr Ragit Varia put it bluntly: “If AI is advancing at Formula One speed, then legislation, regulation and governance cannot be left sitting in the pit lane.” For UK health leaders, the warning reframes adoption as a governance problem as much as a technical one — without clear accountability, the Health Foundation cautions, public trust in clinical AI could erode faster than the tools are rolled out.

Share this article