Description: Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staff reportedly fed National Endowment for the Humanities grant descriptions into ChatGPT to determine whether projects were "DEI," then allegedly used those outputs to help compile a list of grants to terminate. Beginning in April 2025, NEH canceled awards and clawed back funding, reportedly disrupting humanities organizations and projects nationwide after officials allegedly relied on a purportedly flawed, insufficiently vetted AI screening process.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: OpenAI developed an AI system deployed by United States Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) , Justin Fox (DOGE) and Nate Cavanaugh (DOGE), which harmed National Endowment for the Humanities grantees , Humanities organizations , Scholars and Epistemic integrity.
Alleged implicated AI system: ChatGPT
Incident Stats
Incident ID
1402
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-04-02
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Incident Reports
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When the Trump administration went looking last spring for National Endowment for the Humanities grants to cut, it turned to a familiar scourge of professors: ChatGPT.
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Variants
A "variant" is an AI incident similar to a known case—it has the same causes, harms, and AI system. Instead of listing it separately, we group it under the first reported incident. Unlike other incidents, variants do not need to have been reported outside the AIID. Learn more from the research paper.
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