
Trump’s New America.gov Chatbot Seems to Drop Acid When You Tell It to Play Minecraft
The official America.gov chatbot produces a bizarre, hallucinatory response when users prompt it to play Minecraft, which is actually a modified version of the game's ending poem. This easter egg appears to be a hardcoded response rather than a standard LLM generation, replacing player references with federal government imagery. The feature was revealed shortly after President Trump established the platform via executive order, which notably uses the term 'super intelligence' instead of 'artificial intelligence'.
- ▪The America.gov chatbot outputs a specific, incoherent text when asked to play Minecraft, which is a riff on the original Minecraft end poem.
- ▪Every user who tested the prompt received the exact same response, suggesting the output is hardcoded rather than dynamically generated by the LLM.
- ▪President Trump established the America.gov platform via executive order, mandating that federal agencies integrate it within 90 days.
- ▪The executive order avoids the term 'artificial intelligence' and instead requires that 'super intelligence' used on the platform be accurate and transparent.
- ▪Gizmodo contacted the White House to inquire about the inclusion of this inside joke, but did not receive an immediate response.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/trumps-new-america-gov-chatbot-seems-to-drop-acid-when-you-tell-it-to-play-minecraft-2000819161 |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:28:45 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T23:32:33.589Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T23:32:33.589Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 8LD7R8V2yA0a · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
You’re gonna be alright, America.gov. We’re gonna get you some Gatorade and let you chill out with a whale sounds CD for a while. That sound okay? That might be your instinctive reaction to what happens when you tell the official chatbot of the United States of America to “play minecraft.” To say it “glitches out” would be an understatement. It seems to fully enter “bad trip” mode. © America.gov / Gizmodo screenshot While seemingly incoherent and hallucinatory, the text is a riff on the end poem for Minecraft, originally written by the Irish poet Julian Gough and triggered when you reach the closest thing to an “ending” in Minecraft, which isn’t really a linear game.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.