On Friday, the Social Security Administration rolled out a new ChatGPT-style chatbot called “Agency Support Companion.” The tool was meant to help staff handle routine tasks and boost productivity. Instead, employees say it barely works, and a mismanaged launch has left many wondering if automation is the right path for America’s largest social services agency.
In recent months, Musk’s organization, known internally as DOGE, has aggressively reduced federal agencies by cutting jobs and budgets. The push toward an “AI-first” model aims to replace human workers with software wherever possible. As part of that strategy, the new chatbot was built into the everyday workflows of agency staffers, reported by Wired, with the promise of easing their workload.
An internal email described it as a way to “assist employees with everyday tasks and enhance productivity,” but in practice, the app has received little attention.
Sources inside the agency say the roll-out was accompanied by a painfully bad training video featuring a poorly animated, four-fingered woman. The clip was supposed to guide users through the app’s features, but it failed to warn staff against uploading sensitive personal data. This slip forced the agency to send a follow-up email reading, “Our apologies for the oversight in our training video,” to warn employees of the risk.
Few people have taken the SSA AI training video seriously
“I’m not sure most of my coworkers even watched the training video,” one Social Security staffer told Wired. They added that when they tested the chatbot, “several of the responses I received from it were incredibly vague and/or inaccurate.” Other employees reportedly mocked the crude graphics. “Nobody I know is [using it]. It’s so clumsy and bad,” the source said.
Critics warn that this stumbling start may foreshadow wider failures.
Similarly, in Brazil, during 2018, a state-owned company called Dataprev launched Meu INSS, an app designed to process social security claims using computer vision and natural language processing. However, the system has often rejected valid claims due to minor errors, triggering lengthy legal appeals.
One example involves 55-year-old Josélia de Brito, a former sugarcane worker whose retirement application was denied because the automated system misidentified her gender. “I have all the documents proving my health condition, proving everything, and [the benefit] still gets denied. It’s a humiliation,” she told the Rest of World.
Rural farmworkers, many of whom lack basic digital skills, have struggled with the shift to online services. “People out here cannot [even] work with Gmail, Facebook, Instagram,” said Francisco Santana, president of the Union for Rural Workers at Barra do Corda. “Processes are [getting] more and more automated, and society wasn’t made ready for it, especially further away, in the outskirts, for people that live in rural areas.”
Those hurdles abroad highlight potential pitfalls for the U.S.
Social services are already under pressure to “modernize,” a push that began under the Trump administration’s team of so-called technocrats.
Musk’s DOGE has taken that mission further by seeking to cut the federal workforce in half. “Everything that can be machine-automated will be. And the technocrats will replace the bureaucrats,” a person familiar with DOGE’s plans told the Washington Post.
DOGE’s emphasis on automation has bred confusion rather than efficiency.
A recent mishap at the SSA illustrates the stakes. DOGE staff reportedly marked “countless” living benefit recipients as “dead,” cutting off their payments. “About 4 million people, they marked them as dead,” said Rennie Glasgow, a longtime claims technical analyst at the agency, speaking to The Daily Beast. “They’re sending us an email saying, ‘If these people come into the office with their identification, you can reinstate them.’” That reinstatement process can take “about three to four days,” Glasgow added, as staff must manually “resurrect” each recipient in the system.
Beyond stopping benefits, DOGE also plans to rewrite the SSA’s entire software codebase within months. Sources say that to meet that deadline, the team will almost certainly rely on AI for coding, a practice that demands close oversight because of the high error rate in machine-generated code.
Given DOGE’s rocky track record so far, an automated overhaul could introduce even more chaos.
Some observers suspect those mistakes may be intentional. A school of critics argues that DOGE’s goal isn’t genuine reform but rather the destabilization of the SSA to pave the way for privatization. If so, the misfires and mayhem may be exactly what Musk’s team is aiming for.
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This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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