For nine months, conservative podcaster Katie Miller has used her social media megaphone to denounce the AI chatbots ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini — accusing them of liberal bias, endangering children or lax security in nearly 500 posts, according to a Washington Post analysis.
Miller has not told her followers that she holds a significant and, until recently, undisclosed financial interest in the outcome. She holds more than $1 million in Elon Musk’s xAI, which is a major rival to the companies whose products she has targeted. Her financial interest was included in a disclosure released by the White House last week detailing the finances of her husband, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
“ChatGPT says President Trump is a 9 out of 10 level threat to Democracy,” Katie Miller wrote on X last week, citing a conservative think tank. “Imagine this AI in your kids’ classrooms with its revisionist history.”
Miller said in a text message that her social media posts are not related to her purchase of stock in the company.
“I’m not getting paid to post, I do it for the love of the game,” she wrote.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Miller has consulted with xAI since August 2025, and she acquired stock in the company on Dec. 19, according to the financial disclosure. In the nearly nine months since, she has shared posts about ChatGPT, OpenAI or the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, more than 400 times, with almost all of the posts being negative, a Post analysis found. She posted similarly negative missives related to Anthropic 64 times and Google’s Gemini 33 times. At the same time, she has posted mostly positive messages about xAI and its Grok chatbot 161 times. She frequently encourages other people on X to try Grok and highlights the company’s growth.
In the nine months before she obtained the xAI stock, Miller almost never mentioned any of these companies online. She had two posts about OpenAI in December, just before the transaction, and she posted six times about Grok, mostly in December. In July 2025, Miller said Grok was the “only truth-seeking AI available to the U.S. government.” She did not mention Anthropic and talked about Google mostly in the context of searching for things online.
The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.
Influencers are increasingly profiting by advancing companies’ messages in Washington, as the Trump administration upends the traditional lobbying industry and prompts more businesses to seek out podcasters and other online personalities who have the ear of key administration officials.
A growing number of political influencers appear to be financially benefiting from promoting causes without fully disclosing their financial ties.
Miller has faced questions for months about whether she is among that group. She declined to comment earlier this year when The Post asked her if she stood to financially gain from frequent posts promoting solar power, which put her at odds with the Trump administration.
The Federal Trade Commission has guidelines regulating influencers’ posts promoting and endorsing companies and products on social media. Multiple legal experts told The Post that under those rules, Miller would be required to disclose her stock in xAI when promoting it on social media.
“Under any ordinary system — including the rules that the FTC has announced — she would need to disclose a financial motivation that would cause people to think about her recommendation differently,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School.
When asked why she didn’t make a disclosure per the Federal Trade Commission rules, Miller responded with expletives attacking The Post as “fake news.”
“I’ve done what every other person in the world does, which is I own a stock in a company,” she said.
Court rulings have significantly limited the FTC’s ability to fine companies and influencers that violate those rules, Tushnet said.
Richard Newman, a lawyer who specializes in defending clients in FTC compliance cases, said any unexpected connection between an endorser and a brand needs to be displayed “clearly and conspicuously.”
Miller does not have as large a following as some other conservative media stars, with 250,000 followers on X and 75,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel. But she regularly reaches some of the most powerful and influential members of the Trump administration. Guests on her podcast have included Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Her husband is one of President Donald Trump’s most powerful advisers. The financial disclosure filing says he “has been recused from all official action pertaining to” her xAI holdings and “from participating in official matters pertaining to his spouse’s employment.”
Miller was a key adviser to Musk inside the government in 2025 when he ran DOGE, the administration’s hugely controversial cost-cutting initiative. She has described her role in interviews as the “chief Elon wrangler.”
After Musk left the government in late May, she continued to work for him in the private sector and appeared to be doing communications work on behalf of xAI briefly in the summer of 2025. In July 2025, she sent some reporters an update about a data center on behalf of the company. The disclosure lists xAI under spouse’s “Employment Assets & Income”; “Other Assets and Income”; and “Transactions” sections.
She announced in August 2025 that she had stopped working for Musk full-time to launch a podcast for conservative women that she promoted as the right’s answer to the popular show “Call Her Daddy.” The same month, she moved into a consulting role for xAI, said a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the arrangement. That role was previously reported by The Atlantic in May. In a June podcast episode, she wore a sweatshirt with an xAI logo.
On Dec. 9, Musk appeared as a guest on Miller’s show, where they discussed the legacy of DOGE, his daily routine and the role his companies, including xAI, could play in a multi-planetary future. She did not mention any professional or financial connection to his companies during the episode.
Ten days later, Miller bought the xAI shares, according to the financial disclosure report. Those shares could not be purchased through a regular brokerage account without special access or connections to the company. At the time, xAI was a privately held company whose shareholders included Musk and prominent venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz.
Buying shares in private companies is far more complex than purchasing shares on the stock market. Miller’s purchase coincided with a multibillion-dollar funding round that closed Dec. 19, according to CNBC.
The financial disclosure filing says that Miller purchased shares in xAI worth between $500,000 and $1 million, but it is not clear what those shares were priced at the time of the purchase.
Since then, xAI merged with Musk’s SpaceX company in a deal that valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. SpaceX then went public. Investors who bought shares in the business while the company was private stood to make large profits. It’s not clear how much the Miller family made from the IPO.
The arrangement appears to be “full of conflicts,” said Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. But there is little oversight of the ways government officials and their families can profit from holding official positions in an administration where the president regularly does just that, he said.
“Nobody cares about financial independence in Trump 2.0,” he said. “No one is watching the watchdogs.”
Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
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