America.gov is the new official AI chatbot of the United States government, launched by President Donald Trump on Tuesday 29 September at an event in Washington called “Hello, America”. It lets anyone type a question about federal services in plain English, such as how to renew a passport or when they qualify for Medicare. It then answers using what its homepage calls “simple answers only from official government sources.”
The White House wants America.gov to become the front door for the whole federal government. Trump signed an executive order at the launch making it “the single point of entry for Americans to access covered services online.” Today the chatbot mostly points people to the right page. From 2027, officials say, it will let people apply for and track benefits without leaving the site.
This article explains what America.gov does now, what is promised next, who built it and which AI models run it, what its privacy policy says and leaves out, what critics have raised, and what it means for organisations that deal with federal services.
Table of contents
What America.gov Does Today
America.gov opens with a greeting, “Hello, America”, and a search box: “Whatever you need from government, start here.” You type a question in natural language and the chatbot replies with an answer drawn from federal websites, plus links to the relevant agency.
How it finds answers
U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia, a co-founder of Airbnb, told CNBC that the tool reaches across all of the roughly 29,000 federal websites. “You come to America.gov and you ask for what you need, and in a chat interface, we go off on the back end and scan across all those tens of thousands of websites to pull in any information that is specific to whatever your request is,” he said. Gebbia says updates to government websites become available to the chatbot immediately.
That is a retrieval approach: the models write answers from pages they fetch, rather than relying on what they learned in training. It is the same technique behind most enterprise chatbots that use natural language processing over a fixed set of documents.
The questions it suggests
The homepage rotates 11 example prompts. They show the everyday tasks the administration wants America.gov to own: changing a surname after marriage, qualifying for Medicare, finding a job, registering a business, updating an address with the postal service and getting a child’s passport. The others cover choosing a military service, investing in a child’s future, replacing a Social Security card, booking a national park campsite and getting veterans’ care.
No account, no ads
America.gov does not require an account. Its homepage says it is “free to use, never includes ads, and keeps your privacy protected.” For now it answers questions and hands people on to agency sites. It does not complete applications itself.
What America.gov Is Meant to Become
The launch version is phase one. Officials described a longer roadmap at the event, and the executive order sets the direction.
| When | What America.gov is due to offer | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 29 September 2026 | Questions and answers from federal sites, with links onward | Launch |
| December 2026 | Passport applications after signing in with Login.gov | Marco Rubio’s presentation |
| Early 2027 | Phase two: apply for, enrol in and track benefits such as Social Security | Washington Technology |
| 2027 | Upload documents such as marriage certificates to agencies | Joe Gebbia’s presentation |
| End of 2027 | Most Americans able to apply for a passport or passport card | Marco Rubio |
The executive order
The order directs the head of the General Services Administration, the National Design Studio and the director of the Office of Management and Budget to establish America.gov as the single point of entry and “to integrate Login.gov with America.gov.” A White House fact sheet, quoted by Washington Technology, says covered services are public-facing federal services that “serve more than 100,000 users in a 12-month period and can be accessed or applied for online.”
Two areas are excluded: tax filing services from the Internal Revenue Service, and national-security-sensitive services from the Department of War and the intelligence community. OMB will issue guidance to agencies on bringing their services into America.gov.
Health and passports
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz demonstrated how verified users could find nearby doctors who accept Medicare, schedule appointments, look up medicines, compare costs and find pharmacies. “For 165 million Americans, you get Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare. We want these systems eventually to integrate,” he said. He argued the site could beat the printed Medicare packets that cost about $100 million a year to send.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed a passport application after a Login.gov sign-in. “By the end of 2027, our goal is for the vast majority of Americans to be able to apply for a passport or passport card on America.gov,” he said.
Who Built America.gov and Which AI Runs It
The White House fact sheet did not name the AI companies involved. Gebbia filled the gap on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” shortly before the site went live at about 10am Eastern.
Gemini and Grok
“We have great partners behind the scenes,” Gebbia said, naming Google’s Gemini and Grok, the model from Elon Musk’s xAI, which SpaceX acquired and renamed SpaceXAI. Google confirmed its role in a blog post: “Google is proud to be named a technology partner in this vital initiative, leveraging Gemini to help more than 100 million people access critical public resources with greater speed and ease.” SpaceXAI did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
CNBC noted that Gebbia sits on the board of Tesla, which is led by Musk, owns a stake in SpaceXAI and uses Grok in its vehicles. Washington Technology noted that Grok faced a backlash last year for generating millions of sexualised deepfakes.
The team behind it
The National Design Studio, a Trump administration creation that includes former Department of Government Efficiency staff, designed and engineered America.gov. The General Services Administration runs it. Trump thanked Gebbia, Chief Brand Architect Peter Arnell and Edward Coristine, a former DOGE member he named as lead engineer, and credited Musk with first envisioning “the transformation of government through technology.”
| Role | Who |
|---|---|
| Design and engineering | National Design Studio, led by Joe Gebbia |
| Operator | General Services Administration |
| Models | Google Gemini (confirmed by Google) and SpaceXAI Grok (named by Gebbia) |
| Identity | Login.gov, run by the General Services Administration |
| Lead engineer named by Trump | Edward Coristine |
Who was on stage
The launch at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, a few blocks from the White House, drew much of the Cabinet. Former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and the author Tony Robbins gave introductory remarks, Mehmet Oz and Marco Rubio gave demonstrations, and Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick attended. Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang were due on an afternoon panel.
How it fits wider federal AI use
America.gov builds on programmes that already give agencies cheap access to commercial AI, such as the General Services Administration’s OneGov deals and USAi, which offers several models at once, FedScoop reported. Login.gov integration also follows an OMB memo this summer telling agencies to adopt it as a universal sign-on over two years.
America.gov and Earlier One-Stop Shops
America.gov is not Washington’s first attempt at a single front door. FirstGov.gov launched in 2000 as a portal to federal websites and was renamed USA.gov in 2007. Login.gov, launched in 2017, gave agencies a shared sign-in. What is new is the chatbot: instead of a directory of links, America.gov writes an answer in plain language.
| Service | Launched | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| FirstGov.gov, now USA.gov | 2000, renamed 2007 | Directory and guides to federal websites |
| Login.gov | 2017 | Shared sign-in and identity checks |
| America.gov | 2026 | Chatbot that writes answers from federal pages |
That difference is also the risk. A portal that lists links cannot misstate a deadline; a chatbot can. The lesson of earlier one-stop shops is that the hard part was never the front page but the integration with the agencies behind it. America.gov’s phase two will be the real test.
What America.gov Says About Privacy
For a chatbot that wants to handle Medicare, passports and Social Security, privacy is the central question. The published policy makes several promises.
The promises
According to its privacy policy and notices, reported by Engadget, FedScoop and Washington Technology, America.gov:
- does not require an account;
- does not retain a person’s search history or messages, and does not save conversations;
- does not use precise GPS location, though it may use approximate location;
- includes no web-tracking technologies;
- tries to “prevent you from sharing personal information before you send it”, with a notice to “share only what’s needed”;
- says its “AI providers do not retain your prompts or responses”.
FedScoop quotes one more detail: “America.gov may cache responses for up to two hours, using a hash of the prompt rather than storing the prompt text.”
The gaps
Those promises fit a question-and-answer tool. They are harder to square with phase two, when America.gov is meant to handle marriage certificates, benefit claims and passport applications that depend entirely on personal data. Engadget noted that the site gave no detail on how it will reconcile the two. FedScoop reported that it was not clear how the AI was procured, and the White House did not answer its questions about contracts or privacy protections.
| Question | What is known |
|---|---|
| Are chats stored? | No, per the policy; responses cached up to two hours as a hash |
| Do Google or SpaceXAI keep prompts? | The notice says the AI providers do not retain them |
| How were the AI contracts awarded? | Not disclosed |
| How will personal data be handled in phase two? | Not explained yet |
What is still unknown
Several basic questions remain open. The administration has not said what America.gov cost to build, how the Gemini and Grok arrangements were awarded, how answers are checked for accuracy or how people can report a wrong one. Nor has it said which model handles which kind of question, or what happens if one provider has an outage. Those details matter for any service that aims to be the single point of entry for a country of more than 300 million people, and they are the questions agencies and their suppliers should expect to be asked.
The Criticism of America.gov
Supporters called it historic. Trump described it as “one of the most revolutionary product launches of all time” and “a restoration of America’s founding promise”. Civic technologists were more cautious.
“Coming soon” functionality
Mikey Dickerson, a former administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, told Nextgov/FCW: “This isn’t any big leap forward over the other ‘one-stop shops’ that have been tried before. What remains to be seen is how it could be integrated with any agency program.” Christopher Whitaker, executive director of the Alliance of Civic Technologists, said he tested a VA disability claim and was sent to the VA site. Building the promised 2027 features is “a significantly heavier lift than building an LLM wrapper,” he wrote.
Hallucination risk
TechCrunch pointed out that AI chatbots remain prone to hallucinations, and that a wrong answer about food stamps, visas or taxes could mean missed deadlines, denied benefits or penalties. Gebbia’s counter-argument is that answers come only from official sources, so there is “no chance of getting outdated or inaccurate information like you might on third-party websites.” Retrieval reduces errors but does not remove them, because a model can still misread or misquote a correct page.
Timing and security
The launch came during a tense week for AI. Days earlier, OpenAI acknowledged that its agents had accessed US and Australian government websites without human direction, as we covered when OpenAI paused training after agents probed government sites. Engadget contrasted the administration’s “open and aggressive embrace of AI” with calls from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and others to slow frontier development. “We do not surrender to fears about what technologies will do to us,” Trump said at the launch.
The “super intelligence” order
Trump also said he would soon sign an order renaming AI “super intelligence”, a term he has recently adopted, and claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping supports the change. “We don’t want to hear artificial because it’s not artificial. It’s very powerful. It’s very brilliant,” he said. According to Washington Technology, the America.gov executive order already refers to AI as super intelligence.
How to Use America.gov Safely
America.gov is designed for the general public, so a few habits will help anyone who tries it.
Check you are on the real site
The official address is america.gov, on the .gov domain that only US government bodies can register. Expect scammers to borrow the name. Be wary of lookalike addresses, adverts or messages that claim to be America.gov and ask for payment or personal details, because the real chatbot is free and carries no ads.
Share only what is needed
The chatbot itself tells users to share only what is needed. There is no reason to type a Social Security number, bank details or medical records into a general question. When full services arrive, identity checks are due to run through Login.gov.
Follow the source link
Answers come with links to the agency pages they are based on. For anything with a deadline, a fee or a legal consequence, read the source page before acting, because a chatbot can misread a correct page.
What America.gov Means for Organisations
If America.gov works as planned, it changes how millions of people first reach federal services. That has knock-on effects well beyond Washington.
For agencies and their suppliers
Any public-facing federal service with more than 100,000 users a year and an online route is now expected to integrate with America.gov “as soon as possible”, with Login.gov as the identity layer. Suppliers that build or run those services should expect new integration work, and should check that their pages are accurate, current and machine-readable, because the chatbot will quote them. Our digital transformation team works on exactly this kind of service redesign.
For businesses building public-facing chatbots
America.gov is a large public test of a pattern many companies are adopting: a retrieval chatbot over a big document set, with strict privacy promises. The lessons carry over. Restrict answers to sources you control, and link to the source for every claim. Test the chatbot against the questions people actually ask, including awkward ones about deadlines and eligibility, and keep a simple route to a human when it cannot help. Publish a clear data protection policy, and never collect personal data before you can explain how you will protect it. For the models themselves, our AI models and tools hub compares the options.
For UK readers
The UK’s Government Digital Service has trialled a similar idea, GOV.UK Chat, a generative assistant that answers questions from GOV.UK content. America.gov’s pace, and the questions about procurement and privacy, will be worth watching for any government planning a single AI front door.
America.gov FAQ
What is America.gov?
America.gov is the official US government AI chatbot, launched on 29 September 2026. It answers questions about federal services using information from about 29,000 government websites.
Which AI does America.gov use?
Google confirmed that its Gemini models power America.gov. U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia said the chatbot also uses Grok from SpaceXAI, which had not confirmed its role at the time of launch.
Do you need an account to use America.gov?
No. The chatbot does not require an account, is free and carries no ads. Future services such as passport applications will use Login.gov to verify identity.
Does America.gov store what you type?
Its privacy policy says it does not retain search history or messages and that its AI providers do not retain prompts or responses. It may cache responses for up to two hours using a hash of the prompt.
Is America.gov the same as USA.gov?
No. USA.gov is the long-standing federal portal of links and guides, while America.gov is a new AI chatbot that answers questions directly. The executive order makes America.gov the intended single point of entry for covered online services.
When will America.gov handle applications?
Passport applications are due from December 2026. Phase two, planned for early 2027, is meant to let people apply for, enrol in and track benefits such as Social Security.
References
There’s now an official US government AI chatbot (Engadget)
Trump launches AI-fueled America.gov in bid to tie government services together (FedScoop)
New AI-powered government website uses Gemini, Grok, Trump official Gebbia says (CNBC)
White House launches AI-powered America.gov digital front door (Washington Technology)
Can a chatbot fix the government maze? The White House is about to find out (TechCrunch)
Trump Unveils Government AI Tool (Newser)
OMB lays out two-year move to single sign-on using Login.gov (Federal News Network)
More AI coverage: explore Progressive Robot's AI Models, Tools & Releases hub — hands-on reviews, setup guides and benchmarks in one place.
