Billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is ripping through the federal government’s agencies at a breakneck pace — to the horror of many, but perhaps particularly IT professionals and cybersecurity experts. As part of their efforts to analyze huge swaths of sensitive data, Wired reports, DOGE is training a custom AI chatbot for the US General Services Administration (GSA), which manages office buildings and IT infrastructure across the federal government. According to the publication’s sources, the purported goal is to sift through contracts and procurement data to get a better sense of where the government’s money is being spent. Needless to say, introducing an inherently flawed and wildly unreliable technology and allowing it to access copious amounts of sensitive data could have disastrous outcomes. Former president Joe Biden introduced an executive order for the “safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of AI” in 2023, which was focused on preventing AI-enabled threats to national security, among other goals. But on his first day in office, president Donald Trump revoked the order, setting the stage for a far more loose and potentially reckless, Silicon Valley-inspired “move fast and break things” approach. In other words, the development of an AI chatbot intended to make sweeping budgetary recommendations for the federal government is part of a much larger “AI-first strategy” — unintended consequences be damned. We’ve long known that the tech has an tendency to hallucinate facts and leak sensitive data, making it an incredibly poor fit for the job. In an…Elon Musk's DOGE Training an AI to Analyze Government Spending