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‘Things Are Going to Get Intense:’ How a Musk Ally Plans to Push AI on the Government

404 Media has obtained audio of a meeting held by Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate who is now heading a team of government coders. In the call one employee pushed back and said one of the planned moves is an “illegal task.”
Musk and Trump.
Image: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson.

Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate and now head of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), told government tech workers in a meeting this week that the administration plans to widely deploy AI throughout the government. Shedd also said the administration would need help altering login.gov, a government login system, to further integrate with sensitive systems like social security “to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud,” which employees identified on the meeting as “an illegal task.”

Shedd, who is a former Tesla engineer, said the government should “try to get consent,” regarding login.gov changes but that “we should still push forward and see what we can do.”

WIRED and the New York Times previously reported on aspects of the meeting. 404 Media has now obtained audio of the full meeting and quotes it extensively below. Shedd told TTS workers that the administration would need help making radical changes to various government systems: “Things are going to get intense,” he said.

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Are you a current or former worker for 18F, TTS, the GSA, or a similar entity? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Jason securely on Signal at +1 202 505 1702; Joseph on +44 20 8133 5190; and Emanuel on +1 609 678 3204.

These potential changes, he said, would include things like creating “AI coding agents” that would write government software for many different agencies and would be trained in part on existing government contracts, larger scale automations of government, and, critically, changes to Login.gov. 

“Just like a fun one that we've been thinking through with Login, specifically in TTS is, as most of you know, Login can't access government information on individuals. And so there's no connection that Login has with social security or any other government system, even though we're part of the government,” Shedd said. “And so part of one of the things to work through is how do we make it so that those agencies that has that information of very secure APIs that can be leveraged by login to further identify individuals and detect and prevent fraud?” 

“I'm not saying that this is an easy task, but it is a task that's worth trying to pursue and one that only we can do as an internal team, right? We can't bring a third party in, hire them and have them work on a project like this. It has to be an internal technology team that works on this,” Shedd continued.

During a question-and-answer session, a government employee told Shedd that The Privacy Act forbids agencies sharing personal information without consent. 

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