The key facts

  • Two senior House committee Democrats demanded that Trump preserve his correspondence with AI chatbots
  • The trigger was reports of consultations with Grok about military operations in Venezuela
  • A closed briefing was requested on AI use practices in the White House

A letter from two committee leaders

Two senior House Democrats — Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the Oversight Committee, and Jamie Raskin, who holds the same position on the Judiciary Committee — sent a letter to President Donald Trump on Thursday demanding that he preserve his correspondence with artificial intelligence chatbots. The move came after reports that Trump had sought advice from Grok — the chatbot of Elon Musk's social platform X — regarding US military operations in Venezuela. The report was published by the Turkish news agency Anadolu.

The lawmakers' arguments

“If the American president relies on policy advice from a Musk-made, Hitler-friendly chatbot with a propensity for child pornography while carrying out his official duties, Americans have a right to know,” the lawmakers wrote, citing past public scandals surrounding Grok, after which X said it had made fixes to the technology. They also added: “If the US military killed dozens of innocent schoolchildren based on erroneous advice from an AI chatbot, we have a right to know that too.”

A reference to the strike on a school in Iran

According to Anadolu, the lawmakers' second remark alludes to a strike on an elementary school in the Iranian city of Minab on February 28, on the first day of the war with Iran, which killed about 175 people, most of them schoolgirls no older than 12. The text of the letter does not assert that the strike was actually linked to chatbot advice: the lawmakers frame it as a hypothetical scenario that, in their view, should be verifiable. The outlet does not report whether the White House or X itself confirmed the reports about Trump's consultations with Grok on Venezuela.

Legal basis and request for a briefing

In Garcia and Raskin's view, AI queries sent by the president and his staff, as well as the responses received, qualify as presidential records under the Presidential Records Act and are subject to mandatory preservation. In addition, the lawmakers requested a closed briefing on how Trump uses AI chatbots and on the White House's policies for preserving, protecting, and monitoring AI queries and responses. The publication does not report any reaction from the White House to the letter.