ChatGPT-4.5 scored 90% on feline eye disease cases versus 96.7% for experienced veterinary ophthalmologists and significantly outperformed novices scoring 56-67%. That single data point from a 2025 Veterinary Ophthalmology study contains most of what is actually known about LLM clinical utility in veterinary practice: competitive with novice clinicians on well-defined diagnostic tasks, below expert performance, and not tested on drug dosing decisions where the failure modes are more dangerous.
Where LLMs Add Value in Veterinary Practice
Published studies from 2024-2026 document LLM performance on veterinary clinical vignettes for companion animals at levels competitive with veterinary students and recent graduates. The tasks where LLMs perform best are differential diagnosis generation, where broad knowledge coverage matters, and client communication drafting, where fluency matters more than precision. In clinical decision support roles where a veterinarian reviews AI suggestions before acting, the performance gap between LLMs and experienced clinicians is less consequential.
The Drug Dosing Risk
Veterinary pharmacology is complicated by the diversity of species in practice. Drug dosing for dogs and cats is moderately well represented in LLM training data. Drug dosing for exotic species (reptiles, birds, small mammals) is sparsely represented, and the consequence of errors is significant: therapeutic windows are narrow and interspecies variation is extreme. A 2025 Ghent University study found that LLM drug dosing recommendations for avian and reptile patients were frequently outside safe therapeutic ranges. The error rate on exotic species dosing is a serious limitation for any veterinary LLM deployment.
Limitations
No veterinary LLM study has measured patient outcomes. All evidence is on diagnostic accuracy against held-out cases or clinical vignettes, not on whether LLM-assisted care produces better outcomes than standard care. The studies that exist are predominantly single-center, single-species, and single-task.
Related coverage: AI in Veterinary Medicine: What the Clinical Evidence Actually Shows | AI-Assisted Zoonotic Disease Detection: From SARS to H5N1 | One Health and Machine Learning: How AI Bridges Human and Animal Disease Surveillance
Primary sources: 2025 Veterinary Ophthalmology LLM study; Ghent University exotic species dosing study 2025.