Trump officials planned to let artificial intelligence software developed by one of Elon Musk’s deregulatory foot soldiers undertake “regulation extermination” and even write new federal statutes, according to newly released government documents reviewed exclusively by the Lever.
The documents reveal for the first time how the AI program was pitched to government employees and trained to target certain regulations to boost President Donald Trump’s pro-business deregulation agenda.
According to the records, “SweetREX,” an AI tool developed by a Musk acolyte, was programmed to identify and eliminate rules that imposed costs on private enterprises, limited business innovation, or used race-based classifications, among other criteria. Using such parameters for guidance, the program could also process more than a hundred thousand public comments in less than half an hour.
“The documents reveal, for the first time, the shortcuts this AI tool takes when deciding whether a regulation is legally required and whether its burdens outweigh benefits to the public,” said Daniel McGrath, senior oversight counsel at the legal advocacy group Democracy Forward, which obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The new documents detail how SweetREX was pitched to government officials. It is not clear whether staffers went on to use SweetREX during its government-purge operations over the past year or, if they did, whether they tested or evaluated the program to ensure it wasn’t making mistakes.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was devised and then run by tech billionaire and Trump supporter Musk from January to May 2025, claims to have cut $215 billion in government costs through administrative downsizing, contract cancellations, and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Along with consuming gargantuan amounts of electricity and water, AI has a history of making poor regulatory decisions with…
Auteur: Freddy Brewster
