The administration wants America.gov to be the main portal for federal services.
The US government now has its own AI chatbot. America.gov is an interface for people to ask natural language questions about information and services from federal agencies. The chatbot’s web page states that it “uses AI to get simple answers only from official government sources.” While it currently is just a way to sort through openly available information, the platform is intended to offer users more actions next year, such as enrolling in Medicare, applying for a passport or finding employment with the federal government. A new executive order further directs administrative leaders “to establish and operate America.gov as the single point of entry for Americans to access covered services online, and to integrate Login.gov with America.gov.”
According to its privacy policy, the chatbot will not retain a person’s search history or messages and will not use their precise GPS location. It also claims to help “prevent you from sharing personal information before you send it” and does not require an account to use. The site did not add any details about how it will reconcile those privacy claims with the goal of handling tasks that rely entirely on citizens’ personal data.
The fact sheet from the White House did not specify which AI business it worked with to develop the chatbot, but the tool runs at least partially on Google’s Gemini platform. The tech company confirmed today that it is “a technology partner” for the project and that Gemini is part of the America.gov operation. Chief Design Officer for the country’s National Design Studio Joe Gebbia said in an interview today that the chatbot also leverages SpaceXAI’s Grok, but that company has not publicly announced its involvement at the time of writing.
The open and aggressive embrace of AI from the national government, which may also see the creation of an AI Force in the near future, marks a starkly different stance from one that’s been more recently espoused by voices both inside and outside the tech industry following multiple security failures. Earlier this week, OpenAI acknowledged that its AI agents obtained access to US and Australian government websites without human direction. These were just the latest disclosures compounding worries that AI researchers lack the proper safeguards, particularly for developing new frontier models. Google, Anthropic and Meta have also been in the headlines for varying levels of AI security failures this year.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been one of the more vocal AI leaders encouraging a change in approach, stating “I believe we owe it to humanity to try” to curb the rate of frontier model development. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has also commented on the need for limitations, while about a thousand employees from AI companies signed an open letter asking for government intervention to regulate development.
“We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” Trump said today at an event where the government chatbot was unveiled. “We decide that those technologies will do for us some very, very incredible things.”
