Trump administration officials have told some U.S. government employees that Elon Musk’s DOGE team of technologists is using artificial intelligence to surveil at least one federal agency’s communications for hostility to President Donald Trump and his agenda, said two people with knowledge of the matter.
The DOGE team is also using the Signal app to communicate, according to one other person with direct knowledge of the matter, potentially violating federal record-keeping rules because messages can be set to disappear after a period of time.
And they have “heavily” deployed Musk’s Grok AI chatbot – an aspiring ChatGPT rival – as part of their work slashing the federal government, said that person. Reuters could not establish exactly how Grok was being used.
The use of AI and Signal reinforces concerns among cybersecurity experts and government ethicists that DOGE is operating with limited transparency and that billionaire Musk or the Trump administration could use information gathered with AI to further their own interests, or to go after political targets.
Reuters’ interviews with nearly 20 people with knowledge of DOGE’s operations – and an examination of hundreds of pages of court documents from lawsuits challenging DOGE’s access to data – highlight its unorthodox usage of AI and other technology in federal government operations.
The Trump officials said DOGE would be looking for people whose work did not align with the administration’s mission, the first two sources said. “Be careful what you say, what you type and what you do,” a manager said, according to one of the sources.
In addition to the use of Signal, some DOGE staffers are bypassing other vetting processes and chains of custody for official government documents by working simultaneously out of Google Docs instead of circulating single copies of drafts, a source briefed by a government official said.
Since late January, more than 100 tech staff at OPM have lost access to the cloud where key applications are stored, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Only two people still have access — one career staffer and Greg Hogan, a political appointee who worked at an AI startup and is now OPM’s chief information officer, the sources added. Hogan did not respond to a request for comment.
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