Elon Musk, who wants AI to replace federal workers, is now using it to spy on them.
After speaking to 20 people close to the situation, Reuters has reported that officials within the Trump administration told federal employees that DOGE “technologists” are using AI to monitor “anti-Trump or anti-Musk language” at the Environmental Protection Agency. One person also said DOGE is using Musk’s Grok AI chatbot—an aspiring ChatGPT competitor—to make massive cuts to the government.
“Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” a manager allegedly told one of Reuters’s sources.
This is a grimly ironic development for Musk, who constantly claims that he and his X platform are bulwarks of free speech. The EPA has yet to comment.
“[It] sounds like an abuse of government power to suppress or deter speech that the president of the United States doesn’t like,” government ethics expert Kathleen Clark told Reuters.
DOGE employees are also using Signal—the app that landed Mike Walz in hot water for a week—to message each other. And on top of that, DOGE employees are working live on Google Docs instead of using the single copy vetting and chain of custody process that is standard operating procedure for the government.
If these allegations of spying, Signalgate II, and the use of Google Docs are true, they’re a very serious breach of security and a demonstrable lack of transparency from DOGE.
