Reuters reports that Elon Musk’s annoying chatbot, Grok, is now being used by the U.S. government. While the extent and nature of that usage is unclear, sources interviewed by the news outlet have expressed alarm at the implications of the chatbot’s access to government data.
Grok was launched by xAI, an AI company founded by Musk in 2023, and has since become integrated into Musk’s social media platform, X. The chatbot is known to summarize information in the most cringe-inducing manner possible, and was originally fashioned as an “anti-woke” antidote to ChatGPT and other more politically correct applications (though it’s turned out to be too woke for conservatives anyway).
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team is now using a customized version of Grok, with the apparent goal of sorting and analyzing tranches of data. The team may also be using the chatbot to prepare reports, sources told the outlet.
Aside from the very obvious data privacy concerns raised by Grok’s integration with government data, it appears that, once again, Musk is at the center of a conflict-of-interest violation. In fact, Reuters characterizes the promotion of Grok as a potentially criminal transgression of federal regulations. The outlet writes:
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. “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 Painter. The statute is rarely prosecuted but can result in fines or jail time.
Yes, but how many times have we heard that one before? Elon has conflicts of interest up the wazoo. He is a walking conflict of interest, at this point. To my knowledge, he’s never seen the interior of a courtroom and, unless he gets caught with a dead body or something, it seems doubtful he ever will.
Ever since Musk helped Trump get re-elected with hundreds of millions from his own piggybank, he’s has been treating the U.S. government like his personal plaything to destroy. Everywhere you look, the billionaire appears to be benefiting from his work with the government, whether it’s the White House bullying tariffed countries to adopt services from the billionaire’s satellite internet company, Starlink, or a new report that shows the billionaire’s companies may have saved nearly $2.37 billion from federal fines and penalties that were active under Biden but have since been “neutralized” in the Trump era.
As far as DOGE’s mandate goes, the organization has been an unmitigated failure. It has barely saved a fraction of the money that Musk initially claimed that it would and, in the long term, the cuts are likely to cost Americans money, since many of them have been to important agencies that dispense key services to Americans.