May 27, 2025 – During an appearance in front of a Senate committee last week, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary said the agency is now using artificial intelligence (AI) to help oversee the safety of the nation’s food supply.
“We’re using AI to identify where we should be concentrating our food inspections,” he said, “and it turns out the AI can sometimes figure out pattern recognition faster than we can as human beings.”
The agency has been working on a pilot program focused on imported seafood for several years, but a bigger shift is now taking place, with an “aggressive agency-wide AI-rollout” announced earlier this month that will impact various departments, including scientific reviews of new drugs.
According to an FDA spokesperson, “all FDA centers will be operating on a secure, unified generative AI platform integrated with the agency’s internal data systems” by June 30.
It’s just one example of the Trump administration’s larger embrace of AI that has implications for the country’s food system. Trump signed an executive order to boost AI in January, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been using his AI program, Grok, to analyze federal data. Last week’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission report included a recommendation to use AI to analyze nutrition data “for early detection of harmful exposures and childhood chronic disease trends.”
But the news that the FDA will expand its use of AI within its food-safety procedures comes at a moment of heightened concerns about the agency’s oversight of the food supply. In February, the FDA failed to share the findings of its investigation into an E.coli outbreak that sickened nearly 90 people last fall with the public, according to the Washington Post.
Makary has maintained that no “scientists” have been cut amid the agency’s downsizing, and criticized the Post for using a “misleading headline,” but other reporting has found individuals working on food safety have been fired (and sometimes reinstated). Makary also told the Senate last week that the FDA reduced its communications staff from 380 to 160 positions. “That covers a lot of the communication work,” he said.
