HIPAA compliant AI tools
Chat assistants and copilots. The consumer product and the business product usually have completely different terms under the same brand.
The brand on the screen tells you nothing here. The same assistant, with the same name and the same interface, can be covered on one subscription and explicitly excluded on another, including business-labelled plans that sound as though they ought to qualify. Terms are also unusually granular: eligibility may depend on which product line you bought, whether a particular data-retention setting has been applied to your account, and which individual features or endpoints you use.
The larger exposure is not the account you buy but the one you did not. Staff already hold personal assistant accounts, and pasting in a difficult paragraph to have it reworded is a natural thing to do. That single paste sends patient information to a consumer service with no agreement behind it. Nothing logs it and nobody notices, so a written policy plus a sanctioned alternative is the only realistic control.
5 AI assistants compared
5 of 5 can be used with patient information under a signed agreement. Each row is drawn from that vendor’s published documentation as read on the date shown — open an entry for the full conditions and sources.
| Vendor | Verdict | Agreement and plan | How to get it | Not covered | Reviewed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon BedrockAmazon Bedrock | Conditional | None stated. Eligibility is per service; AWS names no support-plan or tier requirement on the reference. | AWS states only that a business associate agreement must be entered into before protected health information touches an eligible service. The reference does not describe the signing route — confirm it with AWS rather than assuming. | The Fable and Mythos model families, which AWS names as excluded from Bedrock's HIPAA eligibility. | |
| ClaudeClaude Enterprise and the Claude API | Conditional | Claude Enterprise, or the first-party API. Consumer plans are not covered. | Enterprise: the Primary Owner accepts the agreement while activating HIPAA compliance in organization settings under Data and privacy. API: the Primary Owner signs, then contacts an Anthropic representative or the sales team to enable it. | Consumer Claude plans, which are not among the HIPAA-ready services the agreement is offered for. | |
| Google GeminiGemini in Google Workspace | Conditional | Google Workspace under an accepted agreement. The included-functionality list does not enumerate eligible editions — confirm yours in the Admin console before relying on it. | Super administrator → Admin console → Account settings → Legal and compliance → review and accept the agreement. | Gemini in Chrome, which Google excludes by name from included functionality. | |
| Microsoft CopilotMicrosoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat | Conditional | A commercial Office 365 or Microsoft 365 licence carrying Microsoft 365 Copilot or Copilot Chat. Also in scope for Government Community Cloud tenants. | Nothing to request. The agreement is available by default through the Product Terms to customers that are covered entities or business associates. | The free consumer Copilot. It is not named among the in-scope Office 365 commercial services, and Microsoft's list is a positive one — absence is not an oversight to read past. | |
| ChatGPTChatGPT and the OpenAI API | Conditional | ChatGPT for Healthcare, ChatGPT for Clinicians, Enterprise with Regulated Workspace, sales-managed Enterprise or Edu, or the API with Modified Retention. Not ChatGPT Business and not any consumer plan. | API: email baa@openai.com with company and use-case details. ChatGPT Enterprise, Edu or Healthcare: contact OpenAI sales. ChatGPT for Clinicians: verify your NPI and licence at signup, then sign in-product under Settings → Agreements. | Consumer ChatGPT — Free, Plus and Pro accounts are not eligible and have no agreement. |
What to check before you adopt one
- Confirm eligibility for the exact product and subscription you intend to buy, since consumer and even some business tiers of the same assistant are excluded while others are covered.
- Ask whether a specific retention or data-handling setting must be applied to your account before patient information may be processed, and get confirmation it is active.
- Check which features an administrator can switch on that fall outside the agreement, and whether those features are off by default.
- Establish how plugins, custom assistants and connected apps are treated, as these carry their own terms and are rarely reached by yours.
- Re-check the vendor's eligibility page far more often than you would in other categories, because these product lines and their terms change within months.
The expensive mistake
Deploying an approved assistant for the organization and stopping there. The risk sits in the personal accounts staff already use, pasting a letter to shorten it, a note to reword it, a difficult message to soften it. Unless you name the sanctioned tool, discourage or block the consumer version, and explain why, the approved deployment simply runs alongside the unapproved one.
Tracking which of these your organization uses?
The vendor and BAA register keeps every tool that touches patient information, its agreement status and its renewal date in one place — seeded from this research. See pricing.
Information, not certification and not legal advice. Each entry reflects that vendor’s published documentation as read on the date shown on its page. Vendors change terms without notice — confirm anything you rely on directly with them.