Washington, D.C. — Today, Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, called on President Donald Trump to preserve his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots after reports that he sought advice from Elon Musk’s Grok concerning U.S. military actions in Venezuela. In a letter to President Trump, the Ranking Members also request a briefing on the President’s use of AI and the White House’s policies for preserving AI prompts and responses as presidential records.
In the letter to President Donald Trump, Ranking Members Robert Garcia and Jamie Raskin wrote, “If the American President is relying on the policy advice of a Musk-designed, Hitler-friendly chatbot with a predilection for child pornography in order to carry out his official duties, Americans have a right to know. If the United States military killed dozens of innocent schoolchildren based on the faulty advice of an AI chatbot, we have a right to know that too. And if an unelected oligarch is influencing U.S. policy through his AI-generated alter ego, Americans have a right to know how our government’s decisions are being reached.”
The Presidential Records Act establishes public ownership of records created or received by the President and his staff in the course of their official duties. AI prompts submitted by the President and his staff, and the responses they receive, fall within the definition of presidential records and must be preserved. To ensure those records are protected, Ranking Members Garcia and Raskin requested a closed-door briefing on President Trump’s use of AI chatbots and White House policies governing the preservation, security and monitoring of AI prompts and responses.
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