As companies rush AI-powered products and services to market, some non-profits and safety-focused companies are pushing to slow them down in higher-risk use cases such as health care.

Why it matters: Since faulty AI can be a matter of life and death in health settings, health care providers need support in building, buying and using the technology safely.

• Bias along gender, racial and economic lines can be amplified by poorly-designed AI algorithms.
• The AI in healthcare market looks to grow seven-fold to around $102 billion by 2028, by one forecast.
• AI efficacy is hard to measure, opening the way for scams, particularly in the adjacent wellness industry.

What's happening: An explosion of generative AI-powered services prompted the World Health Organization to warn in May about the need to demonstrate evidence-based benefits before services are offered to patients and consumers.

• In Taylor v. Intuitive Surgical, the Washington state Supreme Court found that manufacturers of dangerous medical products, in this case an AI-powered robot surgical device, have a duty to warn hospitals about dangers, such as which patients could be poor candidates for receiving surgery.
• Virtual therapists and AI companions are promoted as ways to combat loneliness but may come with long-term risks.

Brain wave technology — such as The Crown, a $2,000 wellness wearable — claims that measuring your gamma brain waves while playing certain types of music refined over time by AI can increase your concentration “by over 25%.”

• But if you connect it to ChatGPT, your brain data is also helping to train its AI model.

Driving the news: A new transatlantic Responsible AI in Healthcare consortium, organized by the Austin-based Responsible AI Institute, launched on Wednesday at Cambridge University with the aim of helping hospitals and other health providers use AI more safely.

• The consortium is forming as companies such as Dandelion Health and System scale with the aim of helping healthcare providers weed out biased data and unsafe products.
• Physician-founded Hippocratic AI launched in May with $50 million seed funding for its large language model honed for health care uses.

The details: The Responsible AI in Healthcare consortium is backed by Harvard Business School and the U.K. National Health Service — the world’s largest government health agency, with over 1.2 million staff.

• The consortium aims to influence policymakers and investors, in addition to health care providers.
• Its first product will be a Responsible Generative AI Safety Index scoring AI systems. The goal is to provide a rating as clear and easy to read as a credit score.
• Consortium members will engage in collective learning and “actively experiment with and refine responsible generative technologies in a real-world health care context,” per a consortium statement.

What they're saying: "The responsible use of AI in the healthcare industry has immense potential," said Hatim Abdulhussein, national clinical lead for AI at NHS England, who wants to see guardrails developed by cross-organization work.

• "Health care organizations need to be able to innovate with generative AI without putting their organization or customers at risk," Seth Dobrin, CEO of Trustwise, a founding member of the consortium, told Axios.

A tech sector job used to be a dream ticket, but now it may be a fast-track to stress and substance abuse, according to a survey of 500 tech leaders.

Why it matters: High salaries, stock options and office perks at tech companies are starting to take a back seat to job loss fears, long hours and other stresses.

What's happening: The survey of tech executives at companies with 1,000 or more employees was conducted by pollster Censuswise for All Points North, a luxury health care provider.

Top findings include:

• 4 in 5 tech execs are taking medications ("controlled substances"), and among that cohort 1 in 2 use them "every day or nearly every day."
• 3 in 4 say that recent layoffs, and the future risk of AI replacing their roles, has negatively affected their health.
• 1 in 2 self-reported as qualifying as heavy drinkers (three to seven drinks per day).
• 1 in 3 used controlled substances such as amphetamines and sleeping pills specifically to cope with work stress and long hours.

Yes, but: Some of Silicon Valley's wealthiest founders and investors are increasingly open about their drug use from ketamine to magic mushrooms, Wall Street Journal reported this week.

• Psychedelics advocates say their choices aren't about stress, but about extending creativity and dissolving mind and body boundaries.

Given the chance to comment on the state of cloud computing competition before the FTC, leading tech platforms had their knives out, Axios' Ashley Gold reports.

Driving the news: The FTC sought comment about the "competitive dynamics" and data security of cloud computing, an exploding industry in which top tech platforms are competing for customers.

• Complaints focused on the business practices of leading providers Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
• Pro-consumer groups argued cloud companies are locking customers into pricey contracts with anticompetitive tactics.

Why it matters: Regulation and litigation around Big Tech competition have been playing out for more than a decade involving social media platforms, search engines and e-commerce sites.

• Cloud is poised to be the next big venue for industry infighting and competitive tension as companies vie for business.

Be smart: Cloud competition is a new frontier without many rules, and this especially aggressive FTC, helmed by Democrat Lina Khan, won't hesitate to propose new ones depending on the feedback it gets.

The big picture: Companies including Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle all want to help companies move their operations to the cloud as legacy on-site data warehousing becomes obsolete.

• They compete with one another on price and offerings and all boast an ability to interoperate, but they all work a little differently.
• End-user spending on cloud services is projected to reach nearly $600 billion in 2023, per research from Gartner, with spending buoyed by investments in AI.

Details: One notable standoff is between Microsoft and Google.

• "The cloud industry is currently at an inflection point in the contest between legacy software constructs — restrictive licensing, closed ecosystems, and creating anticompetitive barriers — and the cloud’s original promise and potential," Google writes in its comment.
• Google extensively details what it views as unfair behavior from Microsoft, alleging that Microsoft uses its dominance in software products like Microsoft Word to "unfairly leverage that dominance in the nascent cloud market."

The other side: "We have made changes to our cloud licensing terms to address licensing concerns and provide more opportunity for cloud providers," a Microsoft spokesperson told Axios.

Trading Places

• Rackspace CTO Srini Koushik will lead the company's new spin-up Foundry for Generative AI by Rackspace (FAIR).

ICYMI

• Watch Ina and me discuss AI impacts across industries and countries in an Axios conversation. (Axios)
• ChatGPT maker OpenAI faces a federal class action lawsuit over use of copyrighted content and individual people's data in training its model. (Washington Post)
• Harvard computer science students are getting an AI teacher this fall. (The Harvard Crimson)
• A new investment round of $100 million gives Typeface, a generative AI platform for enterprise content creation, a more than $1 billion valuation. (Bloomberg)
• The State University of New York and Swiss-based Health Innovation Exchange have announced a Global Center for AI in Mental Health, aiming to open in the fall. (SUNY Albany)

AI-generated artworks can be a lot of fun. Who wouldn't want to memorialize themselves as a Baroque rapper?