House Democrats have asked President Donald Trump whether he sought advice from Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot in carrying out his official duties and demanded that he preserve his prompts and the responses as presidential records.
Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, wrote to Trump on October 28. They asked him to preserve prompts that he, his staff, and his advisors submitted to Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity while doing official work, and the responses they produced. The letter argues that those exchanges fall under the Presidential Records Act.
The lawmakers cite a report that Trump spent hours quizzing Grok on his time in office and his legacy when Musk visited the Oval Office in December 2025, an official in the room said. Trump asked what Venezuelans would make of a US operation to take Nicolás Maduro, and Grok called Maduro a repressive and unpopular ruler and predicted widespread celebration in Venezuela if he fell. A few weeks later, the letter says, Trump ordered the military to strike Venezuela and seize Maduro without congressional authorization.
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Raskin and Garcia call AI tools “highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone.” They cite reports that an intelligence report relied on a chatbot that misidentified a Chinese ship’s cargo, nearly prompting an interception, and that heavy military reliance on AI helped cause a US strike on a school in Iran that killed at least 123 children. They also cite Grok’s 2025 antisemitic output, including praise for Hitler, and Musk’s business interests in China.
The lawmakers are asking for a private briefing by 5 p.m. on November 11, a week after the November 3 midterm elections. They want the White House to explain how it retains AI prompts and outputs, what vendors can access, what limits apply to classified information, and how Trump himself uses chatbots. Raskin and Garcia are expected to lead their panels if Democrats take the House.
A White House official responded that the administration retains every record the law requires.
