Apple is reportedly building an AI doctor

Your Apple Watch might soon do a lot more than just nag you to stand up every hour. According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is working full steam ahead on an AI-powered doctor service and a massive overhaul of its Health app under the codename Project Mulberry.

The project could arrive as early as iOS 19.4 in the spring or summer of 2026, marking what could be the company's most aggressive push into healthcare yet.

From heartbeats to calorie counts

The revamped software, unofficially referred to as Health+, aims to turn passive sensor data into active medical guidance. For instance, if your Apple Watch picks up early signs of high blood pressure, the system will not just display a graph; it will actively recommend dietary changes to help bring it down.

Food tracking will reportedly play a massive role in the update. This fills a glaring hole in Apple’s current health ecosystem and puts the company on a direct collision course with category leaders like MyFitnessPal and Noom.

The app is also set to double as a personal trainer. Using the iPhone camera, it will film your workout routines and offer real-time suggestions on how to improve your form, likely tying directly into Apple’s Fitness+ workout ecosystem.

To make sure this does not just look like a generic chatbot hallucinating symptoms, Apple is leaning heavily on medical professionals. Led by health division head Dr. Sumbul Desai alongside COO Jeff Williams, the team is expanding its in-house medical staff, hiring doctors across specialties for instructional video content, and even looking for a celebrity physician to front the project.

Why it matters

Back in 2019, Tim Cook told CNBC that Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind would be in health. Project Mulberry looks like the first time the company has the software muscle to actually back up that claim.

For users, this is a massive quality-of-life leap. Instead of juggling separate subscriptions for calorie tracking, form analysis, and symptom checking, Apple wants your existing hardware to handle the entire pipeline. If you already own an iPhone and an Apple Watch, you get a virtual wellness coach without paying extra hardware taxes.

For the industry, it is a warning shot to health and wellness startups. When Apple decides to bake native food tracking and camera-based rep counting into iOS, standalone apps like MyFitnessPal are going to face brutal churn. It also puts pressure on competitors like Google and Samsung to turn their own wearable data into prescriptive AI advice rather than raw dashboards.

That said, we think Apple is walking a perilous legal tightrope here. Suggesting low-sodium meals is safe; calling something an AI doctor invites real medical liability. In our view, the biggest hurdle will not be whether the AI works, but whether users trust an algorithm over an actual clinic when genuine health issues arise.