America.gov's Chatbot Contradicted Trump. Then It Stopped Talking Politics.

The Trump administration has launched a government chatbot at America.gov.

On Tuesday 29th September, Trump signed Executive Order 14432, "Streamlining Access to Government Services Through America.gov", which says Americans will be able to "receive accurate answers" and commits the government to making sure the "super intelligence" behind it is "accurate, reliable, and transparent". The White House says it will eventually help with tasks like renewing passports and enrolling in Medicare.

According to TechCrunch, Google and SpaceXAI were involved in building it, and Trump said in a speech that 20-year-old Edward Coristine, known as "Big Balls" from Elon Musk's DOGE, was a lead engineer.

People promptly tested it (of course). The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt asked who won the 2020 election, and the chatbot said Joe Biden, contrary to Trump’s oft-made claim that he was the rightful winner. Asked about Trump's claim that Americans are "twice as wealthy as they were a short time ago", it pointed to Federal Reserve data showing 73% of adults "doing okay" or "living comfortably", unchanged from recent years. And Mashable reports it said "Yes" when asked whether Trump is in the Epstein files^[1].

TechCrunch's Amanda Silberling found that asking the chatbot about Minecraft made the chatbot “appear to have some sort of existential crisis or awakening", producing a roughly 1,800-word monologue that opens with the following:

I see the constituent you mean.
((insert legal name here, as it appears on the Social Security card))?
Yes. Take care. It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations.
That doesn’t matter. It thinks we are a chatbot.
I like this constituent. It filed well. It did not give up when the PDF was sideways.
It is reading our thoughts as though they were words on a .gov.
That is how it chooses to imagine many things, when it is deep in the dream of a benefit.

This wasn’t a malfunction. It was a rewrite of Minecraft’s "End Poem" by Julian Gough, and, as far as anyone has been able to establish, nobody knows who put it there. This is art, surely.

The chatbot's behaviour didn't last. AP reported that within hours, it was refusing to answer questions on topics it had just answered, including on who won the 2020 election. The New Republic found that several queries that had previously produced fact-checked responses now received non-answers.

Bobby Kogan of the Center for American Progress previously asked whether the Big Beautiful Bill made the poorest Americans poorer and the richest richer, with a one-word answer — it said "yes". The next day it said, "I do not provide political commentary or assessments of how legislation affected income groups." CNN's Daniel Dale posted on X that when asked about things that Trump has claimed, for example that he inherited the “worst inflation in history”, the chatbot now responds, "I help with official U.S. government services and information."

Nobody outside the administration knows what changed. The New Republic reported that someone at the General Services Administration appears to have tweaked the chatbot, while other possibilities include a new instruction, a safety rule, a change in its sources, or a manual override. A White House official told AFP only that America.gov will keep being updated to provide the "most accurate and reliable federal information and resources".

Meanwhile, Urgent Matter, which put about 40 arts-related questions to the chatbot on 6 October, found it paraphrases "artificial intelligence" as "Super Intelligence", following a second executive order Trump signed on launch day that tells agencies to use "Super Intelligence" and "SI" instead of AI. When asked whether Trump had ever been sued over an artwork or art transaction ^[2], it said, “I cannot help with questions about personal lawsuits or art transactions involving a private individual.”

When I asked it about Minecraft on the 7th of October, the chatbot said, “I can only help with U.S. government services and official information”. Whatever the cause, it has the feel of Winston Smith's re-education in 1984: the facts haven't changed; only the chatbot's willingness to state them has.

I think I preferred its original Minecraft response.