Microsoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing conditions

For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now “it is finally here,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge . The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors.

The findings, published Thursday in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, Science , are based on tests pitting Microsoft’s AI system against human physicians on a series of scenarios drawn from medical case reports and emergency department data. Microsoft compiled the cases into its own benchmark, SDBench, which it plans to open-source. Designed to function like a panel of medical experts, Microsoft’s Diagnostic Orchestrator uses multiple AI agents to reason through symptoms and medical histories, decide what tests to order, and arrive at a diagnosis, mimicking the process doctors use to investigate cases.

On cases taken from hundreds of reports published in The New England Journal of Medicine , Microsoft’s system achieved a diagnostic accuracy of around 83 percent, compared with roughly 36 percent for generalist physicians using references and 22 percent for those working without them. The Diagnostic Orchestrator also outperformed doctors on emergency department cases drawn from a large database of patient admissions at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, scoring 80 percent accuracy compared with an average of 47 percent for human physicians. The AI system also tended to reach its diagnoses at a lower estimated cost than human counterparts.

King tells The Verge that Microsoft plans to begin testing the system in hospital settings with the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to see how it performs in real-world clinical environments. Neither King nor Suleyman would commit to a firm timeline, though King says it will likely “get underway in the next couple of months.”

The researchers say that the system, which is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-5, also outperformed frontier AI models operating on their own, though the peer-reviewed paper does not include newer models like GPT-6 Astra , Meta’s Muse Wonder Full , Google’s Gemini 4 Argon , or Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 . The Diagnostic Orchestrator was first developed when GPT-4.1 was the most advanced model available, but the researchers say subsequent testing suggests that “improvements in model capability do not necessarily diminish the benefits” of having multiple agents work together.

Microsoft acknowledges there’s a long road ahead before the technology can be widely deployed. While the tests more closely mirror the way doctors diagnose conditions — asking questions, weighing possible explanations, and ordering tests before reaching a diagnosis — the system has only been tested on past medical cases and it remains unclear how well it would perform in real clinical settings. “It needs clinical validation,” Suleyman says. “That is a leap, but this is a major milestone along that journey.”

The research is part of a broader ambition at Microsoft to develop what the company calls “medical superintelligence” — AI that can outperform the best human-led healthcare systems. Microsoft has used the term “superintelligence” since before Donald Trump and his administration co-opted it as a catch-all replacement for “AI.”