The Trump administration launched a federal chatbot on Tuesday morning and, at the same event, signed an executive order requiring agencies to plug their services into it. The site is America.gov, it opens with a search bar and the line “Whatever you need from the government, start here”, and according to the platform it draws on roughly 29,000 government websites.
Joe Gebbia, the US Chief Design Officer and an Airbnb co-founder, told the launch audience the site is “trained specifically on one official source of truth: The United States Government”. Speaking to CNBC’s Squawk Box the same morning, Gebbia said the platform is powered by Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok.
The order is the part with deadlines in it
The launch is the visible half. The executive order signed at the event is the half that binds agencies. It establishes America.gov as the single point of entry for Americans to reach “covered services” online, and defines covered services as public-facing federal services that are accessible online and serve more than 100,000 users a year. Tax filing at the Internal Revenue Service is excluded, as are services of the Department of War and the intelligence community. The Director of the Office of Management and Budget may change that definition.
The General Services Administrator is to establish and operate the site and to integrate Login.gov as its sign-in system. Agency heads must identify their covered services, integrate them, complete Login.gov integration and report usage and performance data. OMB has 90 days from 29 September to issue the implementing memorandum.
The order’s policy section commits the government to data minimisation, to keeping AI systems “accurate, reliable and transparent”, to leaving records in the custody of the agency that holds them, and to maintaining in-person, telephone and postal routes as alternatives. That last clause matters: it means the chatbot is an addition to the existing channels rather than a replacement for them.
What it can and cannot do yet
The version that shipped on Tuesday tells users where a service lives and how to reach it. Gebbia said the plan is that from 2027 users will be able to complete processes on the platform itself and track their progress — his example was someone changing their name after marriage submitting documents without leaving the site.
The privacy notice above the chat asks users to “share only what’s needed”, discloses that the service may use approximate location, and states that its AI providers do not retain prompts or responses. It adds that America.gov “may cache responses for up to two hours, using a hash of the prompt rather than storing the prompt text”.
The procurement is not public
How two commercial frontier models came to sit behind a federal front door has not been explained. FedScoop reported that the White House did not answer its questions about privacy protections or about the agreements covering the technologies, and that the General Services Administration and xAI did not respond to requests for comment.
That gap is the story’s unresolved edge. The government already runs procurement vehicles for this — the GSA’s OneGov programme supplies AI services to agencies at close to no cost, and USAi gives agencies access to several models at once — but neither has been named as the route here. Trump credited Edward Coristine, the DOGE engineer known online as “Big Balls”, as the project’s lead engineer.
What to watch
The 90-day OMB memorandum is the first checkpoint: it will say which services agencies must move and by when. The second is whether the administration publishes the contracts or the model-evaluation work behind a system that will, on the order’s own definition, front hundreds of services each used by more than 100,000 people a year.
