White House chatbot America.gov gave contradictory answers — Rolling Stone

In the United States, the White House introduced the government chatbot America.gov, which is intended to help users with inquiries about federal government services. During testing, the service gave different answers to political questions and generated unusual text in response to certain unrelated commands, Rolling Stone reports.

In particular, when asked who won the 2020 presidential election, the bot replied: “Joseph R. Biden Jr.” At the same time, it responded to some political questions with a message saying that it does not provide political commentary. The publication notes that the service’s responses changed: some answers available during earlier checks could no longer be reproduced later.

Unusual responses to queries

In response to the command “play minecraft,” the chatbot produced fragments of surreal text, including about “sunlight and trees,” “fire and water,” and starting a small business. Researcher Benn Jordan, who was the first to report this reaction, told Rolling Stone that it was an “Easter egg” referring to the poem that appears after defeating the final boss in Minecraft.

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According to the publication, the bot did not respond in the same way to gaming queries related to Call of Duty. In some cases, it also provided answers on government topics. In particular, on Tuesday the chatbot said that the Congressional Budget Office estimated the number of Americans who could lose health coverage as a result of the “Big Beautiful Bill” at 10 million.

Security concerns

During initial testing, Jordan was able to obtain from the chatbot links to login pages for the internal section of at least one government website. Rolling Stone notes that this URL was not indexed by search engines and was intended for internal use only. By the time the article was published, this method of obtaining the link appeared to have already been fixed.

Separately, the publication drew attention to the fact that the White House released an agreement on responsible handling of artificial intelligence in which the name “United States” was misspelled.