Trump Hit With Demand Over His Secret Chatbot Sessions
The president’s obsession with AI might come back to bite him.
Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC
Top-ranking Democrats have demanded that President Donald Trump preserve his secret chat sessions with “super intelligence” chatbots.
A Time report earlier this month cited an insider who said the 80-year-old consulted Elon Musk’s Grok before launching a military operation in Venezuela.
Now, Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California have demanded that Trump, who is also reported to have spent hours asking his Grok chatbot questions about his presidency and legacy, preserve the conversations.
Elon Musk, whose company developed the AI chatbot Grok, has, at times, been one of Trump’s closest allies.
Kevin Dietsch/Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
In a letter to Trump obtained by POLITICO, the Democrats want “any prompts” the president submitted to the controversial Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Anthropic’s Claude when “carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties.” They also want the responses preserved.
The move represents an effort from the top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees to try to determine whether artificial intelligence, which Trump has insisted be renamed “super intelligence,” has influenced official policy.
Their concerns arose from reporting that suggested Trump’s Grok sessions inspired his operation in Venezuela in early January. They described the link as “deeply troubling,” as the president “consulted Grok — but not Congress — on your military deployment to Venezuela, circumventing Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and introducing instead into American foreign policy decision making a technology that is highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone.”
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Raskin and Garcia have also demanded a briefing on the matter by 5 p.m. on Nov. 11.
Politico reported that a White House official said, “The White House preserves all required records in accordance with the law.”
Grok has very clear pitfalls. Officials worry it may have been used to influence U.S. policy.
Grok/X
According to the Time report from October 1, Trump has “marveled at AI’s capabilities” ever since he returned to power, and during an Oval Office meeting with Musk in December, he spent hours asking his Grok chatbot questions about his presidency and legacy.
At the time, the U.S. military had been conducting highly contentious lethal strikes against Venezuelan boats. He asked Grok how Venezuelans might react to President Nicolas Maduro’s capture, and the chatbot predicted many would welcome the downfall of the “repressive” leader, an anonymous official said.
The president then ordered the mission to seize Maduro in January, prompting street celebrations.
In July last year, the Pentagon signed a multi-million-dollar deal to begin using Grok as part of a wider rollout of AI tools for government use.
The Daily Beast has approached Musk and the White House for comment.
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