On July 16, 2026, the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI) announced PULSE - the Public health Use case and Learning Scaling Engine - a national initiative to help state, tribal, local, and territorial public health agencies responsibly evaluate, implement, and scale generative AI. OpenAI and Anthropic are donating enterprise licenses with up to 2,000 seats for public health practitioners, and Accenture will manage onboarding and the development of an implementation playbook.
Ten selected jurisdictions will participate in the pilots, with applications accepted through August 7, 2026, pilots beginning in fall 2026, and a public playbook expected in 2027. The program is backed by 17 cross-sector collaborators on CHAI’s leadership council.
PULSE names five concrete use cases rather than open-ended experimentation: drug wave prediction for biosurveillance, mapping social determinants of health, community feedback analysis for operations, a multilingual translation hub for public communications, and a FHIR query engine for automated clinical data retrieval. CHAI describes the effort as helping agencies build “trust, practical experience, and a path to responsible implementation.”
The launch matters as an adoption pattern: frontier labs donating capacity, a neutral coalition setting evaluation guardrails, and a consultancy handling deployment mechanics - a template for bringing generative AI into resource-constrained government agencies that cannot individually negotiate, vet, and operationalize these tools. It also puts OpenAI and Anthropic side by side inside the same public-sector program, with jurisdictions testing both vendors’ models under a common framework.