A high-ranking employee of Elon Musk has created a special chatbot with artificial intelligence that aims to help the Department of Government Efficiency eliminate government waste and is powered by Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI, TechCrunch reports.
The chatbot, which is publicly available, is hosted on a subdomain called DOGE on the website of Christopher Stanley, who works as the head of security engineering at SpaceX and also at the White House.
It is unclear whether the chatbot is experimental or whether DOGE is being used as part of an unprecedented cost-cutting effort in the US government that has raised legal and privacy concerns.
Stanley and the White House press secretary did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The chatbot calls itself the “Department of Government Efficiency Artificial Intelligence Assistant” and claims to be powered by xAI’s Grok-2. The chatbot told TechCrunch that it is here to “assist government officials in identifying waste and improving efficiency.”
The chatbot appears to be an adapted large speech model trained on certain key DOGE goals – especially the five “guiding principles” that include reducing “nonsense” in government requirements and removing “unnecessary parts or processes.”
For example, when TechCrunch asked the chatbot what DOGE should do with USAID, a federal agency that was effectively shut down as a result of DOGE’s reforms, it applied the five guiding principles and recommended removing any “bureaucratic layers” between decision makers and USAID recipients.
The chatbot returns to these five principles across a wide range of topics. When TechCrunch asked the chatbot which 20th-century political leaders DOGE should emulate, it applied the guiding principles and responded with two people: former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, saying they are “great models for DOGE” because they focused on “efficiency, simplification, and the use of technology.”
The chatbot does suffer from some problems, including one that is common to all great language models: hallucinations. When TechCrunch asked the chatbot to name the people who work at DOGE, it initially refused, but later gave generic names and fictitious titles. The chatbot also sometimes gives strange advice, such as recommending that USAID use drones, wearables, and other internet-connected devices to improve efficiency.
DOGE is using artificial intelligence as part of its efforts to modernize the U.S. government, with reports suggesting that DOGE is reportedly working on a separate chatbot for the General Services Administration, the powerful agency that oversees U.S. procurement, according to Wired.
It is also unclear whether using a chatbot with xAI creates a conflict of interest for Musk. Since LLMs typically charge users for using the API, government officials using xAI-based chatbots can directly increase xAI’s revenue. A representative of xAI could not be reached.
