These People Want Us to Let Them Hook Up AI to a Nuclear Weapon

It’s starting to feel like maybe the reason the Trump administration wants so much freedom to use AI for everything is because no one in their government knows how to use any piece of technology without it. According to a report from Democracy Docket, Trump’s Department of Justice has run into a dead end in its search for fraud related to the 2020 Presidential election because they kept emailing the wrong address.

Per the report, the DOJ started prodding the state of Oklahoma to turn over its state-wide voter registration list so the agency could review it as part of its ongoing witch hunt to prove the baseless conspiracy that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. First, it wrote a letter demanding that Oklahoma Secretary of State Paul Ziriax comply with its demands to access the voter rolls. Unfortunately, Ziriax has never been Oklahoma’s secretary of state—he’s the secretary of Oklahoma’s State Election Board.

And hey, mistakes happen. The problem is that the Department of Justice didn’t realize the mistake and instead started peppering other Oklahoma officials to follow up on the request for the voter registration lists. Those emails went unanswered, which may in part be why the DOJ is currently suing Oklahoma, along with 29 other states and the District of Columbia, for failure to comply.

Except…no one in Oklahoma’s government received those emails because the DOJ spelled the email address wrong. According to emails obtained by Democracy Docket, the Justice Department’s Voting Section acting chief Eric Neff kept sending messages to “[email protected]” instead of “[email protected].” Oops! Don’t you hate it when you work for the most powerful legal entity in the country and your authority is constantly being undermined by the fact that you get basic information wrong?

The situation is just the latest in a long line of incidents that show that best practices and digital hygiene are not a part of the Trump administration’s onboarding. Details coming out of the depositions of former employees of the Department of Government Efficiency show just how much wining is going on when it comes to using technology. In one clip that went viral this week, ex-DOGE employee Nathan Cavanaugh detailed how he emailed documents to himself to get them to his personal device, then sent them to DOGE lead Steve Davis via Signal because “there was no other way” to do it.

It’s clear that these people can’t be trusted to use AI for anything meaningful, like determining targets in war. But maybe they could use it to send an email. That seems to be more their speed.