About 1 in 4 US adults has now consulted AI for health information or advice, according to a West Health/Gallup panel of 5,660 adults surveyed in late 2025. Among those users, 46% felt more confident asking their providers questions afterward, and 59% used AI to prepare before a doctor visit — concrete stated benefits that non-users forgo. But the same survey found that 11% of AI health users reported receiving unsafe recommendations, and a parallel UCLA/BMJ Open study rating 250 AI responses to medical questions found 49.6% were problematic to some degree — mostly delivered with confidence and few caveats, making them difficult for users to identify as unreliable. An MIT Media Lab study published in NEJM AI documented that participants systematically overestimated AI medical reliability and could not distinguish AI-generated from physician responses, even when the AI response was inaccurate.
The regret arithmetic here is genuinely ambiguous, which is unusual in this dataset. The action-side risk (22% proxy, bounded by 11% unsafe-recommendation rate and 49.6% problematic-response rate) and the inaction-side opportunity cost (28% proxy, based on AI users’ reported benefits) are close enough that the entry is classified as ‘mixed’ rather than clearly inaction-dominates. How AI is used matters more than whether it is used: supplementing a scheduled doctor visit with AI research before attending is a different action category than using AI as a triage replacement for a symptom that warrants evaluation. The former has low action-risk and meaningful information benefit; the latter has higher action-risk and may cause harmful delay. The 14 million Americans who skipped a provider visit based on AI advice represent the higher-risk end of the use spectrum, though some of those skipped visits may have been genuinely unnecessary.
The honest summary of this entry’s evidentiary state: the AI consultation decision is too domain-specific, use-case-dependent, and rapidly evolving to generate a stable regret-pair estimate. Financial AI consultation self-reports are overwhelmingly positive (Wells Fargo: ~90% found results worthwhile), which would pull the inaction-regret figure up substantially if the financial domain were weighted equally with health. Medical AI consultation carries real documented risk of inaccurate confident advice in a domain where acting on wrong information has direct health consequences. The mixed classification reflects both the genuine uncertainty and the heterogeneity of “consulting AI” as a decision — something between a research tool and an advisor, with properties of each and the disclaimers of neither.