HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

DOGE Reportedly Relied on Unvetted ChatGPT Outputs in Canceling National Endowment for the Humanities Grants

April 2, 2025

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is under scrutiny for allegedly relying on unvetted outputs from ChatGPT, an AI model, to screen and cancel National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Starting from April 2025, this practice reportedly led to cancellations and funding clawbacks, disrupting numerous humanities organizations and projects across the nation. Such incidents underscore the importance of safe and secure AI practices, robust governance, and responsible AI use, especially in critical areas like grant allocation. For those interested in shaping trustworthy AI practices, join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM to help establish guardrails for AI, ensuring harm prevention in future incidents. JOIN US

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
united-states-department-of-government-efficiency-(doge), justin-fox-(doge), nate-cavanaugh-(doge)
Alleged developer
openai
Alleged harmed parties
national-endowment-for-the-humanities-grantees, humanities-organizations, scholars, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1402

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.