President Donald Trump unveiled a new AI-powered website designed as a one-stop shop for government services on Sept 29, deepening his embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) amid growing public scepticism of its economic and social impacts.
Trump signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to integrate their public-facing systems with the new site, America.gov, "so all of this interface will go right into our great, brilliant mind, a super mind.”
At a day-long event slated to feature tech leaders such as Tesla Inc’s Elon Musk, Nvidia Corp’s Jensen Huang and Blue Origin LLC’s Dave Limp, Trump touted a website where citizens will be able to enrol for benefits, forward their mail or process a name change.
Leading the initiative is Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb Inc co-founder whom Trump tapped as the government’s first chief design officer. Gebbia’s National Design Studio, organised under the same structure as Musk’s now-dismantled Department of Government Efficiency, represents an evolution of DOGE’s ambitions – with Gebbia focused less on cutting headcount and more on smoothing consumers’ interactions with the government.
"There’s a topic that unites everyone, men and women alike, young and old, across the political spectrum: Government websites are a nightmare,” Gebbia said on Sept 29 in a Silicon Valley-like product launch presentation.
The new America.gov tool is designed to become the federal government’s home page, letting users navigate information by asking natural-language questions rather than hunting across more than 29,000 government websites. And beginning in 2027, Gebbia said, the site will move "from answers to actions.”
He told CNBC that the site was developed with the assistance of Google’s Gemini and SpaceXAI’s Grok.
The federal government has long struggled to keep pace with the consumer technology Americans use in their daily lives.
Gebbia’s first project under DOGE was to replace the bureaucratic retirement system for federal employees, which relied on shuffling paper records stored in an abandoned limestone mine in Pennsylvania.
The botched rollout of healthcare.gov in 2013 became a symbol of Washington’s digital dysfunction, and the Obama-era effort designed to fix those problems – a problem-plagued agency called 18F – was an early target of DOGE cuts.
"For decades, Washington has paid enormous sums of taxpayer money to federal contractors to build terrible websites that pale in comparison to the experience that you’re used to in the private sector,” Trump said. "We’ve built the finest anywhere in the world. There’s nothing like it.”
The website launch comes as Trump has made American leadership in AI a cornerstone of his second term, repeatedly dismissing calls from researchers and industry figures for tighter guardrails on AI development.
Any slowdown in AI development, he’s argued, would cede ground to China in a technological arms race with profound economic and national security implications.
"Whoever wins super intelligence, wins,” Trump said, using his preferred term for artificial intelligence.
That tension was on display last week during his summit with China’s Xi Jinping, who agreed that China and the US needed to "ensure the development of AI is always under human control,” while making few specific commitments.
AI has also emerged as a key issue in November’s midterm elections, as voters express increasing unease about job displacement and the energy demands of data centres. Trump has brushed off those concerns, dismissing talk of a data centre backlash as a "SICK conspiracy.”
An Economist/YouGov poll last week found that 60% of likely voters favour increased regulation of AI, and 62% said they had "very little” confidence in Trump’s handling of the issue. – Bloomberg
