Artificial intelligence technologies are increasingly embedded in software platforms used by health care providers and other health care organizations. As organizations evaluate contracts involving AI tools, close attention to warranties is critical for allocating risk and ensuring accountability. While many concepts mirror traditional software contracting, AI introduces new dimensions of performance, compliance, transparency, and ethical considerations.
Why Warranties Matter in AI
For AI-enabled software, warranties are the vendor’s legally binding assurances about the AI system’s behavior, quality, and legal compliance. Because AI tools are probabilistic, dynamic, and heavily dependent on customer inputs and implementation choices, warranties must be drafted with particular care. Carefully drafted warranties help ensure that the AI tool performs as expected, that the vendor stands behind its development practices, and that the customer is not exposed to avoidable legal, regulatory, or ethical risk.
An overview of some core warranty categories is included below. As a threshold matter, it is important to understand that warranty concepts among the categories may overlap, and for each category, the ultimate warranty language can be adjusted to be more provider‑friendly or vendor‑friendly depending on leverage and risk tolerance.
Core Warranty Categories
Compliance with Applicable Law: Health care organizations should seek assurances that the AI features comply with laws governing data privacy, intellectual property, anti‑discrimination, and algorithmic or AI‑specific regulation. Vendors should also confirm that the AI tool, when used as instructed, will not cause the customer to violate applicable law.
Performance: Beyond basic functionality, AI performance warranties may include assurances related to:
- substantial conformance to documentation and specifications
- design and deployment practices ensuring transparency, traceability, and auditability
- system capabilities, limitations, and risks
- data governance, accuracy, and relevance
- monitoring, interpretation, and intervention, as applicable
Bias and Ethical Use: Vendors may warrant adherence to AI practices that are responsible and industry-standard for health care organizations, such as transparency, bias mitigation, human interpretability, and ongoing oversight. AI models should be designed and trained to mitigate known biases. Vendors should provide documentation on decision‑making logic, training data categories, limitations, and testing.
Updating: Because AI models evolve, health care organizations should ensure the vendor commits to periodic updates or retraining of the AI tool as necessary to maintain performance and legal compliance. The vendor should warrant that updates will not materially reduce existing functionality unless legally required and that any such impact should be communicated in advance to organizations using the tool.
Training Practices: Vendors should warrant that the AI tool was not trained or developed using data or methods that would infringe third-party rights, violate applicable laws, or expose the customer to legal or regulatory risk. The vendor should also confirm that customer data is processed only in accordance with the agreement, documentation, applicable law, and customer instructions.
IP Infringement: This standard software warranty remains essential: The AI technology must not infringe or misappropriate third‑party intellectual property.
Third‑Party Consents: Vendors should ensure they have secured all required licenses, consents, notices, and third‑party permissions, including those related to open‑source software, training data, and other inputs.
A well-structured and thoughtfully drafted warranty package helps health care organizations adopt AI tools in a highly regulated environment with greater confidence, clarity, and risk mitigation.
