Google is hosting its annual health event, The Check Up, today, with the company's new chief health officer, Dr. Michael Howell, set to outline how the technology giant is applying artificial intelligence to address pressing health challenges.
The event, livestreamed at 11:00am Eastern Time, will feature Dr. Howell and teams across Google presenting the company's latest AI research, technological innovations and partnerships in health.
The 2026 edition arrives at a complicated moment for Google's health AI ambitions, with the company having recently pulled back a prominent consumer feature while continuing to expand its underlying research programmes.
Google confirmed last week that its "What People Suggest" feature is no longer active, following a report by the Guardian citing people familiar with the decision.
The feature, launched on US mobile devices in March 2025, used AI to organise health-related perspectives from online forums into themed summaries, with its then-chief health officer Karen DeSalvo describing it at launch as a way to surface real insights from people with shared conditions.
Google attributed the removal to a broader simplification of the search results page and denied that safety concerns played any role, though the timing is difficult to separate from wider pressure on the company's AI health outputs.
The pullback contrasts with the scale of Google's underlying health AI investment. At last year's Check Up, the company announced TxGemma, a collection of open models designed to improve the efficiency of AI-powered drug discovery, capable of predicting properties of potential new therapies such as safety and effectiveness.
Google also launched an AI co-scientist built on Gemini 2.0, intended to help biomedical researchers parse large volumes of scientific literature and generate novel, testable hypotheses.
In paediatric oncology, Google has been working with the Princess Máxima Center in the Netherlands on Capricorn, an AI tool using Gemini models to help physicians identify personalised cancer treatments by combining public medical data with de-identified patient records.
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Regulators in the UK and EU are watching these voluntary pullbacks as they develop frameworks for AI in healthcare, and whether Google addresses its recent retreats from consumer-facing AI health features at today's event, or focuses on forward-looking research announcements, will signal how openly the company is reckoning with the risks involved.
The full content of today's announcement was not publicly available at the time of writing. This article will be updated as details from the event become available.
The recap
- Google posted an announcement about using AI to improve health.
- Page fetch was blocked and the announcement content was unavailable.
- Announcement carried "Auto-generated stub" requiring editor review.