Elon Musk's team is using a custom version of his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok to scour the sensitive government data scooped up by the Department of Government Efficiency, raising serious concerns about privacy, conflicts of interest and national security.
The DOGE team is expanding use of the AI chatbot, three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters, but it's not clear which specific data had been fed into the generative tool or how the custom system was set up, and five experts told the news organization that the arrangement may violate security and privacy laws.
“Given the scale of data that DOGE has amassed and given the numerous concerns of porting that data into software like Grok, this to me is about as serious a privacy threat as you get,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
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Musk's team has accessed heavily safeguarded federal databases containing the personal information belonging to millions of Americans as part of his stated goal of rooting out government waste and inefficiency, and experts fear that data could be lost or sold, and Grok's access to that nonpublic information could give the tech mogul's xAI operation an unfair advantage over its competitors.
“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, who served as ethics counsel to former president George W. Bush and a current University of Minnesota professor.
Two sources said DOGE staffers directed Department of Homeland Security officials to use Grok, although it hadn't been approved for use in that agency, and the sources said the federal government would have to pay Musk's organizations to use that AI tool, which Painter said could violate criminal conflict-of-interest statute.
“They were pushing it to be used across the department,” said one of the sources.
Two DOGE staffers – Kyle Schutt and Edward "Big Balls" Coristine – are leading the team's efforts to use AI in the federal bureaucracy, according to two sources familiar with the matter, and Musk's team has attempted to gain access to DHS employee emails and ordered staff to train AI to find evidence that government employees are not "loyal" to president Donald Trump's agenda.
"Reuters could not establish whether Grok was used for such surveillance," the news outlet reported. "In the last few weeks, a group of roughly a dozen workers at a Department of Defense agency were told by a supervisor that an algorithmic tool was monitoring some of their computer activity, according to two additional people briefed on the conversations."