Trump hit with demand over his secret chatbot sessions

Top-ranking Democrats have demanded that President Donald Trump preserve his secret chat sessions with “super intelligence” chatbots. 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.

The top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees want President Donald Trump to preserve his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots as part of an inquiry into whether Elon Musk’s AI assistant played a role in shaping White House policy.

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. Raskin and Garcia 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.”

In a letter to Trump obtained by POLITICO, Raskin and Garcia are demanding that the president preserve “any prompts” submitted to AI chatbots, including Musk’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude while “carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties,” along with the AI responses.

Their request was informed by reporting that said Trump sought Grok’s “advice on carrying out some of your presidential duties, including asking Grok to opine on how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.” The lawmakers note that, just “weeks later,” Trump “ordered the U.S. military, without congressional authorization, to attack Venezuela and capture President Maduro.”

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, The Daily Beast writes.

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.

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.

Raskin and Garcia have also demanded a briefing on the matter by 5 p.m. on Nov. 11.

read more in our Telegram-channel https://t.me/The_International_Affairs