Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 01 frontiersin.org Ethical-legal implications of AI-powered healthcare in critical perspective Mohammad Nasir 1 , Kaif Siddiqui 2 and Samreen Ahmed 1 * 1 Faculty of Law, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India, 2 NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, India The increasing utilization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems in the field of healthcare, from diagnosis to medical decision making and patient care, necessitates identification of its potential benefits, risks and challenges. This requires an appraisal of AI use from a legal and ethical perspective. A review of the existing literature on AI in healthcare available on PubMed, Oxford Academic and Scopus revealed several common concerns regarding the relationship between AI, ethics, and healthcare—(i) the question of data: the choices inherent in collection, analysis, interpretation, and deployment of data inputted to and outputted by AI systems; (ii) the challenges to traditional patient-doctor relationships and long-held assumptions about privacy, identity and autonomy, as well as to the functioning of healthcare institutions. The potential benefits of AI’s application need to be balanced against the legal-ethical issues emanating from its use—bias, consent, access, privacy and cost—to guard against detrimental effects of uncritical AI use. The authors suggest that a legal framework for AI should adopt a critical and grounded perspective—cognizant of the material political realities of AI and its wider impact on more marginalized communities. The largescale utilization of health datasets often without consent, responsibility or accountability, further necessitates regulation in the field of technology design, given the entwined nature of AI research with advancements in wearables and sensor technology. Taking into account the ‘superhuman’ and ‘subhuman’ traits of AI, regulation should aim to encourage the development of AI systems that augment rather than outrightly replace human effort. KEYWORDS AI-powered healthcare, AI regulation, augmented intelligence (AI), health data, medical privacy, law and AI 1 Introduction e integration of Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare has stimulated various advancements in diagnostics, treatment and patient care protocols. e most notable contribution of AI is in making worldclass surgical knowledge and expertise available, in all operation theaters at all times, through an AI-powered conduit “Surgical Collective Consciousness” (Acevedo, 2018). Drawing on population data, the collective renders real-time clinical decision support (Hashimoto et al., 2018). AI has been able to save lives and improve healthcare outcomes by making healthcare accessible and healthcare centers more efficient. Recently, Med-PaLM, an AI model cleared the US Medical exam with expert level scores. is signals that AI-powered healthcare is the future (Singhal et al., 2023). Nonetheless, the burgeoning technological developments have spurred a range of ethical and legal concerns warranting critical examination (Hanna et al., 2025). is paper examines the questions of choice and responsibility arising with the large-scale collection and use of data by AI. It argues that by prioritizing ethical considerations in the development and deployment of AI, medical professionals can enhance health outcomes and cultivate patient trust, thereby bridging the OPEN ACCESS EDITED BY Filippo Gibelli, University of Camerino, Italy REVIEWED BY Juan José Martí-Noguer, Digital Mental Health Consortium, Spain Hariharan Shanmugasundaram, Vardhaman College of Engineering, India *CORRESPONDENCE Samreen Ahmed sahmad8@myamu.ac.in RECEIVED 28 April 2025 ACCEPTED 17 June 2025 PUBLISHED 02 July 2025 CITATION Nasir M, Siddiqui K and Ahmed S (2025) Ethical-legal implications of AI-powered healthcare in critical perspective. Front. Artif. Intell. 8:1619463. doi: 10.3389/frai.2025.1619463 COPYRIGHT © 2025 Nasir, Siddiqui and Ahmed. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. TYPE Mini Review PUBLISHED 02 July 2025 DOI 10.3389/frai.2025.1619463