Billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE team is expanding use of his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok in the U.S. federal government to analyze data, said three people familiar with the matter, potentially violating conflict-of-interest laws and putting at risk sensitive information on millions of Americans.
The second and third person said DOGE staff also told Department of Homeland Security officials to use it even though Grok had not been approved within the department.
“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 Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that advocates for privacy.
His concerns include the risk that government data will leak back to xAI, a private company, and a lack of clarity over who has access to this custom version of Grok.
As part of Musk’s stated push to eliminate government waste and inefficiency, the billionaire and his DOGE team have accessed heavily safeguarded federal databases that store personal information on millions of Americans. Experts said that data is typically off limits to all but a handful of officials because of the risk that it could be sold, lost, leaked, violate the privacy of Americans or expose the country to security threats.
In May, DHS officials abruptly shut down employee access to all commercial AI tools – including ChatGPT – after workers were suspected of improperly using them with sensitive data, said the second and third sources. Instead, staff can still use the internal DHS AI tool. Reuters could not determine whether this prevented DOGE from promoting Grok at DHS.
If Musk was directly involved in decisions to use Grok, it could violate a criminal conflict-of-interest statute which bars officials — including special government employees — from participating in matters that could benefit them financially, said Richard Painter, ethics counsel to former Republican President George W. Bush and a University of Minnesota professor.
The push to use Grok coincides with a larger DOGE effort led by two staffers on Musk’s team, Kyle Schutt and Edward Coristine, to use AI in the federal bureaucracy, said two other people familiar with DOGE’s operations. .
DOGE staffers have attempted to gain access to DHS employee emails in recent months and ordered staff to train AI to identify communications suggesting an employee is not “loyal” to Trump’s political agenda, the two sources said. Reuters could not establish whether Grok was used for such surveillance.
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.
Reuters also reviewed two separate text message exchanges by people who were directly involved in the conversations. The sources asked that the specific agency not be named out of concern over potential retribution. They were not aware of what tool was being used.
Using AI to identify the personal political beliefs of employees could violate civil service laws aimed at shielding career civil servants from political interference, said Coglianese, the expert on federal regulations and ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
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