Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, WIRED has confirmed. The move to automate tasks previously done by humans comes as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce.
GSAi is meant to support “general” tasks, similar to commercial tools like ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude. It is tailored in a way that makes it safe for government use, a GSA worker tells WIRED. The DOGE team hopes to eventually use it to analyze contract and procurement data, WIRED previously reported.
“What is the larger strategy here? Is it giving everyone AI and then that legitimizes more layoffs?” asks a prominent AI expert who asked not to be named as they do not want to speak publicly on projects related to DOGE or the government. “That wouldn’t surprise me.”
In February, DOGE tested the chatbot in a pilot with 150 users within GSA. It hopes to eventually deploy the product across the entire agency, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The chatbot has been in development for several years, but new DOGE-affiliated agency leadership has greatly accelerated its deployment timeline, sources say.
Federal employees can now interact with GSAi on an interface similar to ChatGPT. The default model is Claude Haiku 3.5, but users can also choose to use Claude Sonnet 3.5 v2 and Meta LLaMa 3.2, depending on the task.
“How can I use the AI-powered chat?” reads an internal memo about the product. “The options are endless, and it will continue to improve as new information is added. You can: draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.”
The memo also includes a warning: “Do not type or paste federal nonpublic information (such as work products, emails, photos, videos, audio, and conversations that are meant to be pre-decisional or internal to GSA) as well as personally identifiable information as inputs.” Another memo instructs people not to enter controlled unclassified information.
The memo instructs employees on how to write an effective prompt. Under a column titled “ineffective prompts,” one line reads: “show newsletter ideas.” The effective version of the prompt reads: “I’m planning a newsletter about sustainable architecture. Suggest 10 engaging topics related to eco-friendly architecture, renewable energy, and reducing carbon footprint.”
“It’s about as good as an intern,” says one employee who has used the product. “Generic and guessable answers.”
The Treasury and the Department of Health and Human Services have both recently considered using a GSA chatbot internally and in their outward-facing contact centers, according to documents viewed by WIRED. It is not known whether that chatbot would be GSAi. Elsewhere in the government, the United States Army is using a generative AI tool called CamoGPT to identify and remove references to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility from training materials, WIRED previously reported.
In February, a project kicked off between GSA and the Department of Education to bring a chatbot product to DOE for support purposes, according to a source familiar with the initiative. The engineering effort was helmed by DOGE operative Ethan Shaotran. In internal messages obtained by WIRED, GSA engineers discussed creating a public “endpoint”—a specific point of access in their servers—that would allow DOE officials to query an early pre-pilot version of GSAI. One employee called the setup “janky” in a conversation with colleagues. The project was eventually scuttled, according to documents viewed by WIRED.
In a Thursday town hall meeting with staff, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs the Technology Transformation Services (TTS), announced that the GSA’s tech branch would shrink by 50 percent over the next few weeks after firing around 90 technologists last week. Shedd plans for the remaining staff to work on more public-facing projects like Login.gov and Cloud.gov, which provide a variety of web infrastructure for other agencies. All other non-statutorily required work will likely be cut, Shedd said.
“We will be a results-oriented and high-performance team,” Shedd said, according to meeting notes viewed by WIRED.
He’s been supportive of AI and automation in the government for quite some time: In early February, Shedd told staff that he planned to make AI a core part of the TTS agenda.
Dhruv Mehrotra contributed to this report.
