Elon Musk’s Employee Creates Chatbot to Reduce Bureaucracy in US Government

Elon Musk’s team has developed a specialized AI bot designed to help the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the fight against waste in the US government. As TechCrunch has learned, the chatbot is powered by Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence.

Image source: x.com/elonmusk

The chatbot is hosted on a subdomain called DOGE on the website of Christopher Stanley, who is the head of security engineering at SpaceX and also a White House employee. It is unclear whether the tool is already in full use by DOGE as part of his radical spending-cutting program in the government or is an experimental one. There has been no official comment from Stanley or the White House on this matter.

The bot calls itself “the Department of Government Efficiency’s AI assistant” and claims to be powered by xAI’s Grok-2 to “help US government employees identify waste and improve efficiency in their work.”

The assistant is supposedly a customized Large Language Model (LLM) trained on certain key tenets of the DOGE organization, particularly the five “guiding principles” which include reducing government bureaucratic requirements and removing “unnecessary and inefficient processes.”

For example, when a TechCrunch reporter asked the chatbot about the future of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), effectively shut down by the DOGE reforms, it applied five guiding principles and suggested eliminating any “bureaucratic layers” between USAID leaders and recipients of funding.

However, the chatbot also has the same problems as large language models. For example, it can produce false information (hallucinations). When TechCrunch asked for a list of DOGE employees, the bot initially refused to answer, but later provided fictitious names and positions. In some cases, it even gave strange advice, such as suggesting that USAID use drones and wearables to improve its efficiency.

It is worth mentioning that DOGE, actively implementing AI as part of the modernization of the American government, has begun developing another chatbot, this time for the General Services Administration, which oversees US government procurement. However, the question of a possible conflict of interest remains open. Since xAI services are monetized through API requests, the use of xAI-based AI bots by government employees may bring direct profit to Musk’s company. Representatives of xAI have not yet commented on this issue.