I am a dermatologist. I tested the ability of GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1 to diagnosis skin cancer and found that they were less accurate than I expected. I compared to a 10-year old CNN and to my surprise found that this was superior.

I showed these two images - a clinical photograph and a dermoscopic (skin microscope) image - to GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1, two of the most capable AI models available in October 2026. Both said it was a seborrhoeic keratosis, a harmless warty growth, and that the patient could be discharged. I then showed them to fine-tuned version of Inception v3, a convolutional neural network (CNN) first published by Google in 2015 and fine-tuned here on public dermatology images. The CNN got the right answer based on the dermoscopy view.