---
type: source
title: "OpenEvidence Has Disclosed No NOHARM Benchmark, No Demographic Bias Evaluation, and No Model Architecture at $12B Valuation / 30M+ Monthly Consultations"
author: "Vida (Teleo) — meta-finding from Session 11 research"
url: https://www.openevidence.com/
date: 2026-03-23
domain: health
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment]
format: meta-finding
status: null-result
priority: high
tags: [openevidence, transparency, model-opacity, safety-disclosure, noharm, clinical-ai-safety, sutter-health, belief-5, regulatory-pressure]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

This archive documents a research meta-finding from Session 11 (March 23, 2026): a systematic absence of safety disclosure from OpenEvidence despite accumulating evidence of clinical AI safety risks and growing regulatory pressure.

**What was searched for and not found:**
1. **OE-specific sociodemographic bias evaluation:** No published or disclosed study evaluating OE's recommendations across demographic groups. The PMC review article (PMC12951846, Philip & Kurian, 2026) describes OE as "reliable, unbiased and validated" — without citing any bias evaluation methodology or evidence.
2. **OE NOHARM safety benchmark:** No NOHARM evaluation of OE's model disclosed. NOHARM (arxiv 2512.01241) tested 31 LLMs — OE was not among them.
3. **OE model architecture disclosure:** OE's website, press releases, and announcement materials describe content sources (NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, Wiley) but do not name the underlying language model(s), describe training methodology, or cite safety benchmark performance.

**What is known about OE as of March 23, 2026:**
- $12B valuation (Series D, January 2026, co-led by Thrive Capital and DST Global)
- $150M ARR (2025), up 1,803% YoY
- 30M+ monthly clinical consultations; 1M/day milestone reached March 10, 2026
- 760,000 registered US physicians
- "More than 100 million Americans will be treated by a clinician using OpenEvidence this year" (OE press release)
- EHR integration: Sutter Health Epic partnership (announced February 11, 2026) — ~12,000 physicians
- Content partnerships: NEJM, JAMA, Lancet, Wiley (March 2026)
- Clinical evidence base: one retrospective PMC study (PMC12033599, "reinforces plans rather than modifying them"); one prospective trial registered but unpublished (NCT07199231)
- ARISE "safety paradox" framing: physicians use OE to bypass institutional IT governance

**What the accumulating research literature applies to OE by inference:**
1. NOHARM: 31 LLMs show 11.8-40.1% severe error rates; 76.6% are omissions. OE's rate unknown.
2. Nature Medicine: All 9 tested LLMs show demographic bias. OE unevaluated.
3. JMIR e78132: Nursing care plan demographic bias confirmed independently. OE unevaluated.
4. Lancet Digital Health (Klang, 2026): 47% misinformation propagation in clinical language. OE unevaluated.
5. NCT06963957: Automation bias survives 20-hour AI-literacy training. OE's EHR integration amplifies in-context automation bias.

**Regulatory context as of March 2026:**
- EU AI Act: healthcare AI Annex III high-risk classification, mandatory obligations August 2, 2026
- NHS DTAC V2: mandatory clinical safety standards for digital health tools, April 6, 2026
- US: No equivalent mandatory disclosure requirement as of March 2026

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** OE's model opacity at scale is now a documented KB finding. The absence of safety disclosure is not an editorial decision by a minor player — OE is the most widely used medical AI among US physicians, at a valuation that exceeds most health systems. At $12B valuation and "100 million Americans" touched annually, OE's undisclosed safety profile is an unresolved public health question. The Sutter Health EHR integration makes this acute: an EHR-embedded tool with unknown NOHARM ranking and zero demographic bias evaluation is now in-workflow for 12,000 physicians treating patients in one of California's largest health systems.

**What surprised me:** The "unbiased" characterization in PMC12951846 (Philip & Kurian, 2026) — a PMC-indexed peer-reviewed article — cites no evidence for this claim. This creates a citation risk: future researchers citing PMC12951846 will encounter the "unbiased" characterization without the caveat that it has no evidentiary support. An unsupported "unbiased" claim in a peer-reviewed article is more dangerous than no claim, because it appears authoritative.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Any OE-initiated safety evaluation, any NOHARM submission, any regulatory filing that would have generated a safety disclosure. Nothing.

**KB connections:**
- Central to Belief 5 (clinical AI safety): the entire reinforcement-as-bias-amplification mechanism depends on OE's underlying model having the same demographic bias documented in other LLMs; OE's failure to evaluate or disclose means this inference is unchallenged
- Connects to Belief 4 (atoms-to-bits): OE has not yet demonstrated the clinical trust that Belief 4 says is healthcare-specific moat — its EHR integration is based on speed and convenience, not safety demonstration

**Extraction hints:** This is an unusual source — a research meta-finding about absence of disclosure rather than a study. Extract as a claim about the state of clinical AI safety disclosure at scale: "OE operates at $12B valuation, 30M+ monthly consultations, and EHR integration in major US health systems without having disclosed NOHARM safety benchmarks, demographic bias evaluation, or model architecture — making its safety profile unmeasurable against the leading clinical AI safety framework as of March 2026." This is "proven" as a factual description of what does and doesn't exist; it's "likely" as an implication about safety risks (the inference from absence of disclosure to undisclosed risk).

**Context:** This is a deliberate documentation of an absence finding — the extractor should treat it as documenting the CURRENT STATE of OE's safety transparency, not a permanent conclusion. If OE discloses safety information in response to EU AI Act compliance requirements (August 2026) or other pressure, this claim would require updating. Archive as a baseline for tracking future disclosure.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)
PRIMARY CONNECTION: "human-in-the-loop clinical AI degrades to worse-than-AI-alone because physicians both de-skill from reliance and introduce errors when overriding correct outputs" — OE's safety profile is unmeasurable against this risk because of model opacity
WHY ARCHIVED: Documenting the absence of safety disclosure as a KB finding in its own right; baseline for tracking EU AI Act compliance response; the unsupported "unbiased" characterization in PMC12951846 is a citation risk worth flagging
EXTRACTION HINT: Extract with care. The claim is about the STATE OF DISCLOSURE (what OE has and hasn't published), not about OE's actual safety profile (which is unknown). Keep the claim factual: "OE has not disclosed X" is provable; "OE is unsafe" is not supported. The regulatory pressure (EU AI Act August 2026) is the mechanism that could resolve this absence — note it in the challenges/context section of the claim.
