The US government's first public-facing AI chatbot went live on Tuesday, as President Donald Trump unveiled America.gov, a site meant to become a single front door to federal services and information. The launch was tied to an executive order, and the administration says it will expand the assistant's capabilities in the coming weeks.
The chatbot was built with help from Google and SpaceXAI, the Musk-affiliated AI brand. Early red-teamers found it harder to jailbreak than many consumer chatbots — but not watertight. It will tell users that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, a fact Trump continues to dispute.
Its strangest behaviour is reserved for the video game Minecraft. Ask it about the game and it produces a roughly 1,800-word monologue that rewrites the 'End Poem' — the meditative text by Julian Gough that appears after players finish Minecraft — as a riff on federal bureaucracy. 'It has reached a higher level now. It can read the Code of Federal Regulations,' one line reads. Later: 'and the republic said you are stronger than you know, and your case number is still valid,' and 'the darkness you fight is within you, and also a missing wet signature.'
TechCrunch, which documented the exchange, concluded it was an easter egg rather than an AI meltdown — a relief both for national security and for anyone worried the chatbot was hallucinating poetry. Trump has said that a 20-year-old programmer, Edward Coristine — known by the nickname 'Big Balls' and previously linked to Elon Musk's DOGE effort — was a lead engineer on the project.
