Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is pushing to rapidly develop “GSAi,” a custom generative AI chatbot for the US General Services Administration, according to two people familiar with the project. The plan is part of President Donald Trump’s AI-first agenda to modernize the federal government with advanced technology.
Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla employee who now runs Technology Transformation Services, the technology arm of the GSA, alluded to the project in a meeting on Wednesday. “Another [project] I’m trying to work on is a centralized place for contracts so we can run analysis on them,” he said, according to an audio recording obtained by WIRED. “This is not new at all—this is something that’s been in motion before we started. The thing that’s different is potentially building that whole system in-house and building it very quickly. This goes back to this, ‘How do we understand how the government is spending money?’”
While chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini have been adopted across corporate America for tasks like writing emails and generating images, executive orders and other guidance issued during the Biden administration generally instructed government staff to be cautious about adopting emerging technologies. President Donald Trump has taken a different approach, ordering his lieutenants to strip away any barriers to the US exerting “global AI dominance.” Heeding that demand, Musk’s government efficiency team has moved swiftly in recent weeks to bring aboard more AI tools, according to reports published by WIRED and other media.
[N]o dedicated AI-assisted coding tools have received authorization under FedRAMP, a GSA program to centralize security reviews and ease the burden on individual agencies.
Undergoing government reviews can require companies to invest significant time and staff—resources startups may not have. That may have been one challenge affecting Cursor’s ability to win business from the recent DOGE push, as the startup didn’t have immediate plans to achieve FedRAMP authorization, according to one of the people familiar with the GSA’s interest in the tool.
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