America.gov gets really weird when you ask it about Minecraft, but it’s not a glitch

The U.S. government has launched America.gov, a public-facing AI chatbot built with help from Google and SpaceXAI. It is already doing the thing every internet user expected: getting probed, poked, and tried on for size by people looking for a jailbreak. So far, that’s been harder than expected.

There is one obvious blemish. The chatbot says Joe Biden won the 2020 election, which Donald Trump still disputes. But the more bizarre behavior shows up when the topic turns to Minecraft. Instead of a broken answer, America.gov spills out a long monologue that reads like poetry and starts with a line about “the constituent you mean.”

The source of that passage is not a malfunction. It’s a rewrite of Minecraft’s “End Poem,” the text that appears after the game is finished, originally written by Julian Gough. The piece in America.gov runs for roughly 1,800 words, which is a very long way to go for a surprise game reference on a government site.

Trump has said in a speech that 20-year-old programmer Edward Coristine was a lead engineer on the project. Beyond that, the article does not pin down who added the Minecraft material. But the bigger point is clear enough: this government chatbot is weird, and apparently on purpose. For now, that’s less alarming than a real hallucination would be. A government bot that can quote an internet-famous poem is still a strange thing to see, but at least it’s not inventing its own fiction library in the middle of a benefits form.