Position Statement on the Role of Augmented Intelligence in Clinical Practice and Research

Key Findings

• — AI should function in an augmentative role to treatment and should not replace clinicians
• — Patients should be educated and informed, in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way, when clinical decisions are being driven by AI
• — AI-driven systems used in health care should be labelled as AI-driven and categorised in a standardised, transparent way as minimal, medium, high or unacceptable risk to patients, with the EU AI Act's risk tiers cited as a reference point
• — AI developers should be held accountable and liable for injury caused by their failure to incorporate evidence-based practices and standards of care
• — Applications the statement lists as high or unacceptable risk include automated diagnosis from records, automated treatment planning or coverage determinations, digital phenotyping from patient-generated data including social media, reliance on fabricated citations, and AI that replicates human speech (chatbots)
• — Research on AI must address algorithmic bias, ethical use, mental-health equity, public trust and effectiveness, and people with lived experience of mental illness and substance use disorder should be involved in design and implementation

Methodology Notes

Two-page policy document in the APA Official Actions series. Approved by the Assembly in February 2024 and by the Board of Trustees in March 2024; published_date uses the Board approval month with the day set to 01 because no day is stated. Authors are named on the document; collaborating components are the Council on Government Relations and Advocacy, the Committee on Mental Health Information Technology and the Committee on Telepsychiatry. psychiatry.org returns HTTP 403 to automated clients; the PDF was read from the Wayback Machine raw capture of 2026-09-07 (391,347 bytes, identical in size to the 2026-01-27 capture) and the text extracted with pdftotext. This 2024 statement is the predecessor of the 2026 Position Statement on the Use of Artificial Intelligence for Mental Health Services and Treatment (passed by the Assembly in May 2026), whose PDF is not yet readable from this network.

Sources