Why those reports of DOGE using AI have experts worried about ‘massive risk’

New York CNN — Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team is reportedly using artificial intelligence to guide its cost-cutting decisions, a tactic AI experts say could cause security breaches, biased firing choices and cuts of highly qualified, essential government staffers. One of the unnamed sources said the tool could help “analyze huge swaths of contract and procurement data.” After the Office of Personnel Management sent an email to federal workers on February 23 asking them to send five bullet points detailing what they “accomplished last week,” DOGE staffers considered using AI to analyze responses, NBC News reported citing unnamed sources familiar with the plans. Musk said in an X post that AI would not be “needed” to review the responses and that the emails were “basically a check to see if the employee had a pulse.” Wired also reported last month that DOGE operatives had edited Department of Defense-developed software known as AutoRIF, or Automated Reduction in Force, that could be used to automatically rank employees for cuts, citing unnamed sources. In an X post, Musk called the USDS employees who resigned “Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office.” Part of the problem may be that, building an effective and useful AI tool requires a deep understanding of the data being used to train it, which the newly instated DOGE team may not have, according to Amanda Renteria, chief executive of Code for America, a non-profit group that works with governments to build digital tools and increase their technical capabilities. Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images In their letter, the former USDS employees said they were interviewed by people wearing White House visitor badges who “demonstrated limited technical ability,” and accused DOGE of “mishandling sensitive data, and breaking critical systems.” Among the employees working at DOGE are a handful of men in their early 20s and staffers brought over from Musk’s other companies, CNN and others have reported.