When Useful Clinical AI Exceeds Meaningful Oversight.

Human oversight is widely invoked as a safeguard in clinical AI, yet it is often treated as a single, stable property. In practice, clinicians remain responsible for AI-assisted decisions without remaining able to meaningfully review the basis of the output. This tension becomes sharper as systems become multimodal, agentic, and cognitively ambitious. We propose a distinction between cognitive and normative oversight and discuss its implications for AI evaluation and deployment.