Elon Musk’s goons at the Department of Government Efficiency are using his own AI bot, Grok, to analyze potentially sensitive federal government data.
A customized version of Grok, developed by Musk’s xAI company, is actively combing through government data, a person familiar with DOGE‘s activities told Reuters.
Exposing sensitive or confidential data to Grok could violate security and privacy laws, experts in technology and government ethics told Reuters. Moreover, Musk could gain an unfair advantage by training his bot on data that other companies don’t have access to.
In the name of President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting crusade, DOGE has gained access to highly restricted federal databases containing personal information on millions of Americans, and two DOGE staffers—Kyle Schutt and 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine—have spearheaded efforts to use AI to find “waste” and “fraud” in the federal bureaucracy.
Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, warned that by implementing Grok in DOGE‘s work, government data could leak to Musk’s private xAI company.
“Given the scale of data that DOGE has amassed and given the numerous concerns of porting that data into software like Grok, this to me is about as serious a privacy threat as you get,” he told Reuters.
DOGE also instructed officials at the Department of Homeland Security to use Grok despite it not being approved by the department, two other sources told the outlet. A DHS spokesperson denied that DOGE had “pushed” employees to use any particular “tools or products” in a statement to Reuters.
If Musk personally advocated for Grok’s use in government work, it could have violated a conflict-of-interest statute, according to Richard Painter, ethics counsel to former President George W. Bush. Officials—including special government employees like Musk—are not allowed to take part in decisions that could benefit them financially.
“This gives the appearance that DOGE is pressuring agencies to use software to enrich Musk and xAI, and not to the benefit of the American people,” Painter told Reuters.
But conflict-of-interest concerns have become routine in an administration led by a president who seems to show little regard for ethical boundaries—accepting gifts like a $400 million jet from Qatar and hosting dinners for his crypto business.
Musk, the world’s richest person, has eased back from his role in the White House in recent weeks after DOGE said it had saved the government $150 billion, falling enormously short of the $1 trillion savings he had promised the American people.
As part of Schutt and Coristine‘s AI push, DOGE staffers also tried to access DHS employee emails and instructed staff to train AI tools to monitor communications in order to find employees who are disloyal to Trump’s political agenda, two sources told Reuters.
Meanwhile, a supervisor at the Department of Defense reportedly told a group of workers that an algorithmic tool was surveilling some of their computer activity, potentially in violation of civil service laws.
Grok, which is integrated with Musk’s X platform, gained the attention of users last week when it kept ranting about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to completely unrelated prompts.
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