Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is letting his glitchy Grok AI chatbot sift through potentially sensitive government information, according to an exclusive report from Reuters Friday.
One person familiar with the matter told Reuters that DOGE had begun using a customized version of Grok, a generative AI chatbot developed by xAI, which is owned by the billionaire bureaucrat, to do their work.
“They ask questions, get it to prepare reports, give data analysis,” the person told Reuters. Grok was apparently being used to move through masses of information more efficiently in the organization’s search for supposed waste, fraud, and abuse.
Two other people said that DOGE had pressed officials at the Department of Homeland Security to use Grok, despite the fact that it was not approved for use there. Grok’s use in the federal government raises significant concerns about Musk’s many conflicts of interest in his government work and business ventures, as the government would have to pay for access to use the AI chatbot, the sources said.
“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,” said Richard Painter, ethics counsel to former Republican President George W. Bush and a University of Minnesota professor. Musk has been accused of using the State Department to boost Starlink in foreign countries and the Commerce Department to boost Tesla.
Reuters could not independently confirm claims that DHS employees had actually started using Grok, or whether they needed to pay for it. A Homeland Security spokesperson said that “DOGE hasn’t pushed any employees to use any particular tools or products.”
Reports that Grok is being used in the federal government raise other concerns as well, about DOGE’s compliance with privacy laws and its handling of sensitive data. xAi’s website said that it may monitor Grok users for “specific business purposes.”
Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that advocates for digital privacy, told Reuters that DOGE using Grok was “about as serious a privacy threat as you get.”
Musk appears to maintain a disturbing control over Grok’s output. Recently, the AI chatbot began generating answers about white genocide—a non-issue that Musk is very passionate about—when asked unrelated queries.
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