The top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees want President Donald Trump to preserve his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots as part of an inquiry into whether Elon Musk’s AI assistant played a role in shaping White House policy — a preview of what’s to come if their party flips the chamber next week.
In a letter to Trump obtained by POLITICO, Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California are demanding that the president preserve “any prompts” submitted to AI chatbots, including Musk’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude while “carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties,” along with the AI responses.
Raskin and Garcia — who are expected to wield the Judiciary and Oversight gavels if Democrats win back the House, respectively — are also asking for a briefing on the matter by 5:00 p.m. on Nov. 11.
Their request was informed by reporting that said Trump sought Grok’s “advice on carrying out some of your presidential duties, including asking Grok to opine on how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.” The lawmakers note that, just “weeks later,” Trump “ordered the U.S. military, without congressional authorization, to attack Venezuela and capture President Maduro.”
Garcia and Raskin called the example “deeply troubling” because Trump “consulted Grok — but not Congress — on your military deployment to Venezuela, circumventing Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and introducing instead into American foreign policy decision making a technology that is highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone.”
They also said the use of AI chatbots by the White House “exposes the United States to acute national security risks” and that usage “exposes the country to malign influence from unknown and unaccountable third parties.”
A White House official said in a statement that “the White House preserves all required records in accordance with the law.”
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
