The government artificial intelligence platform America.gov began providing answers that contradicted a number of claims by US President Donald Trump, before media outlets detected changes to the chatbot's responses and the concealment of some information depending on the user, the time of the question and its wording.
Launching America.gov and testing its answers
This followed tests by Western newspapers and websites to determine how closely the platform aligned with the president's statements. Trump launched the platform on Tuesday, 29 September 2026, describing it as an artificial intelligence-powered portal that serves as a “digital adviser” to make it easier for citizens to access the government.
The portal currently allows users to search government information, while the plan aims at a later stage to provide services through a single interface, including renewing passports and enrolling in the Medicare healthcare programme. After answers emerged that contradicted the president's narratives, the British newspapers The Independent and The Guardian, along with the US website Axios, reported that the bot began changing some of its answers and withholding information it had displayed during Tuesday and Wednesday.
In some cases, the system answered the questions put to it, but in others it refused to respond on the grounds that it did not provide “political commentary”. The Independent highlighted the changes in a report saying that Trump's team had rushed to modify the government bot after it debunked some of the narratives the president repeatedly advances.
System changes after Daniel Dale's scrutiny
The newspaper quoted Daniel Dale, a CNN correspondent specialising in fact-checking, as saying that the administration had changed the system so that it stopped debunking some of Trump's claims. Nevertheless, it was sometimes still possible to obtain answers contradicting the president, according to journalistic tests that included checking responses through the government portal.
The bot answered the questions in some tests, while declining to answer in others on the grounds that it was avoiding political commentary. Experts who spoke to the website attributed this variation to the internal instructions given to the models, differences in how the models used processed questions, or some responses being based on cached results.
Gabbatt's tests reveal inconsistencies in responses
Journalist Adam Gabbatt tested the chatbot with a series of questions and then compared its responses with Trump's statements in an analytical report published by The Guardian. On the 2020 election, Gabbatt repeated Trump's claim that the election won by former president Joe Biden was rigged and that Trump was the real winner, while the platform answered that Biden had won the election and that no fraud had occurred.
On the economy, Gabbatt put to the bot Trump's statement that Americans had become “twice as wealthy” during his administration compared with the previous period. The platform responded that Federal Reserve data did not show American household wealth doubling since 20 January 2025.
It also contradicted Trump's description of inflation during the Biden administration as “the worst ever”, saying that Consumer Price Index data did not prove that the period from 2021 to 2025 had seen the worst inflation in US history. The comparison also included Trump's claim that the United States and Venezuela together possess 60% of the world's oil, to which the bot replied that the available sources and data did not support the statement.
Platform debunks claims about presidential salary
When his statement that he was the only president to refuse to receive a government salary was tested, the platform said that previous presidents had donated their salaries or declined to keep them.
Gabbatt concluded his analysis with a question comparing Trump, who said that The Washington Post had documented 30,573 false or misleading statements by him during his first term, with the government artificial intelligence platform, which, according to the report, relies on 29,000 websites when formulating its answers.
