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The Government's New AI Front Door Runs on Google's Gemini and Musk's Grok. Its First Answers Contradicted the President, and Before He Finished Speaking It Stopped Taking 'Political Questions' · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the government hired a front desk clerk that reads the file out loud. The Associated Press reported on Tuesday, September 29th, that the White House launched America dot gov, an AI chatbot meant to be the one front door to the federal government, and that within minutes of launch it was contradicting the president who unveiled it.
• 0:22
  [Guest] The clerk told the truth as the government's own files have it. Asked whether Trump won in 2020, the bot answered, no, official results show Biden won. And while he was still on stage, AP says, the answers started changing, so ask again now and it tells you it doesn't take political questions.
• 0:41
  [Host] Back up. What is this thing, and why would I ever use it?
• 0:45
  [Guest] Think of every form you've fought with, a passport, a Medicare plan, a veteran's benefit. The site says it folds twenty-nine thousand government websites into one chat box. And Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder now serving as the government's chief design officer, told CNBC that forty million people a day hit a government website trying to get something done.
• 1:05
  [Host] So it's a search engine with manners. Who's actually answering?
• 1:09
  [Guest] That's the part the site doesn't advertise. Gebbia told CNBC the answers come from Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok, "great partners behind the scenes." The site itself doesn't prominently say which models it runs on, nobody has disclosed what the deal costs, and FedScoop says neither company answered its questions about the arrangement.
• 1:27
  [Host] Hold on. Musk's AI is now a voice of the federal government?
• 1:32
  [Guest] One of two, and Musk sat on a panel at the launch event. Trump signed an executive order on stage that gives every agency ninety days to plug its public services into this one door. He said the entire government will now fit in the palm of your hand.
• 1:48
  [Host] And then his own palm started correcting him. What else did it say?
• 1:53
  [Guest] CNN ran a list. The bot said grocery prices have not fallen since he took office. And at the event Trump claimed no other president had served without taking a salary, but when CNN asked, the bot named Hoover and Kennedy.
• 2:07
  [Host] But then it clammed up, and to be fair, the site's own help page says it doesn't offer campaign or party information. Isn't refusing just the rule?
• 2:16
  [Guest] Then the rule showed up late. The bot answered first, and only after those answers contradicted the president did the 2020 reply go from a flat "no" to a refusal to take "political questions." The same refusal now covers whether the president was impeached or convicted, and that's the public record, not campaign material. The White House's only comment, by unsigned email to CNN, was that the site "will continue to be updated."
• 2:42
  [Host] I go to a government website to renew a passport, not to ask who won in 2020. Why should I care what it says about politics?
• 2:51
  [Guest] Because the instructions aren't labelled politics. If an answer can be rewritten in minutes with nobody outside seeing it, you can't know which others got the same treatment, and a quietly steered answer on a benefit or a deadline is the one you'd never notice. The site promises its accuracy is "never influenced by third parties." Tuesday showed the first party can do it just fine.
• 3:13
  [Host] So what would I need to see before I trust it?
• 3:17
  [Guest] What you'd want from any clerk: the answer, plus a record of every time somebody told it to change one. Wikipedia has run that way for twenty-five years: bots make the routine edits, any person can reverse them, and every reversal is public. Here the reversals happen in the back office.
• 3:35
  [Host] Let's be practical. Right now, today, can it actually do my passport?
• 3:39
  [Guest] No, today it answers you and hands you a link to the agency that still owns the form. Forms and applications in one place are promised for early next year, and Secretary of State Rubio said the goal is for most Americans to be able to apply for a passport on the site by the end of next year.
• 3:59
  [Host] So how much of the job is actually built?
• 4:02
  [Guest] Mikey Dickerson, who once ran the government's in-house tech team, put it bluntly to FedScoop: "You announced a demo which solved like the easiest five percent of the problem." The rest is getting every agency's forms and records to actually run through it.
• 4:17
  [Host] So where does that leave me, with a form to fill out and a bot to ask?
• 4:23
  [Guest] Use it the way you'd use any clerk's directions: take the link, and read the source it cites. The clerk is fine. The hand rewriting the clerk's instructions is the problem.
• 4:34
  [Host] And every agency is under orders to route through that door. What happens until the rewrites are logged somewhere I can read them?
• 4:42
  [Guest] Until then, it's a front door with a back office. For more on who gets to adjust the machines that speak for the state, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.