Elon Musk's DOGE using AI to snoop on U.S. federal workers, sources say

Elon Musk has depicted DOGE as a tech-driven effort to make the U.S. federal government more efficient by targeting waste, fraud and abuse.

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.

While much of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency remains shrouded in secrecy, the surveillance would mark an extraordinary use of technology to identify expressions of perceived disloyalty in a workforce already upended by widespread firings and severe cost cutting.

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 White House, DOGE and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

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.

Kathleen Clark, a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis, said DOGE’s use of privacy-focused Signal adds to growing concerns over data security practices after top Trump administration officials came under fire last month for the mistaken inclusion of a journalist in a group chat about high-level planning for military operations in Yemen.

“If they’re using Signal and not backing up every message to federal files, then they are acting unlawfully,” she said.