We recently learned that Donald Trump has been taking guidance from Grok, Elon Musk’s chatbot best known for enabling nude images of real women.
As Time magazine reported:
In December 2025, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting. Trump spent hours asking Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, questions about his presidency and legacy… He asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the U.S. captured Maduro… the chatbot responded that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After Trump ordered the mission to seize Maduro, the following month, celebrations broke out in the streets. Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious.
Given that the President was so impressed with Grok’s accurate read on Venezuela, he surely had a question or two about the likely outcome of attacking Iran and murdering its leadership. Perhaps Grok obligingly told him it was a fine idea.
Trump is not the only high level official taking counsel from a robot
I asked Grok if it had indeed advised Trump to go ahead on Iran. “No,” it replied somewhat stiffly, “I did not tell President Trump (or anyone else in a private advisory capacity) that attacking Iran would have a positive and beneficial effect.”
Well, it would say that, wouldn’t it?
But Trump is not the only high level official taking counsel from a robot. We do not yet know if he (or Musk) asked the machine to speak with the voice and personality of a human, living or dead. The late Roy Cohn would have been an obvious choice. But I can report one case of a very senior official doing just that.
Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh has made no secret of his messianic faith in the promise of Artificial Intelligence, spouting all the cheerwords about a “revolution,” and an inevitable rapid increase in productivity without triggering inflation. But I am reliably informed that his relationship with the new technology goes deeper than mere endorsement. Warsh’s formative influence as an economist, he has declared, has been his Stanford teacher Milton Friedman, who died in 2006 yet continues to exercise a great hold over people of power and influence.
Warsh, so I hear from inside the Fed, has commissioned a generative AI bot based on the entire corpus of Friedman’s work and named it “Milton.”
A similar initiative incorporates the work of liberal Keynesian economist James Tobin. Yet another covers the recorded thoughts of George Schultz, a conservative eminence in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, who had mentored Warsh at Stanford.
As a senior Fed official explained to me, “[Warsh] likes to sit in his office having long talks with ‘Milton’ about the economy and Fed policy.” Presumably, “Milton” has been urging his now-powerful former protegé to stick close to precepts such as restricting the money supply. If the topic of housing comes up in the chat, Milton might refer to “Roofs or Ceilings.” This, a pamphlet published in 1946 by the National Association of Real Estate Boards with a half-million print run, was an early, little known, Friedmanite effort in the service of business. The Association wished above all things for the abolition of federal rent controls, imposed during the war. The group accordingly commissioned Friedman, then a junior academic at the University of Chicago, along with his friend and fellow economist George Stigler, to write a full-throated diatribe against the hated controls, which they were happy to do for a suitable fee. However the pamphlet did contain a mildly subversive paragraph about reducing wealth inequality, which “Milton,” and certainly Warsh, will feel free to ignore.
I suspect Trump and Warsh are not alone among the world’s leaders in communing with digitally resurrected authorities of yesteryear. Has British Prime Minister Burnham commissioned a Ramsay MacDonald bot? Or, more likely, Harold Wilson? Macron would hardly have passed up the chance to solicit Napoleon’s advice. I don’t like to think who Vladimir Putin might be talking to.
At least we should demand some democratic oversight on this trend. In the US, this could take the form of congressional confirmation hearings. I can see a future Democratic administration enlisting a founding father or two, which could make for some lively exchanges: “Mr. Jefferson, thank you for appearing. Please explain your relationship to Ms. Hemmings.”
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