The Trump administration’s embrace of artificial intelligence hasn’t always worked out especially well. About a month ago, for example, a State Department representative delivered a presentation at an AIDS 2026 conference and referred to a map of Africa that mislabeled multiple countries. A Reuters report noted that the image “contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools.”
The embarrassing incident was not the first of its kind. Border Patrol officials, for example, have been caught misusing ChatGPT. Around the same time, Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, used an AI program to determine which documents to release related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and that process did not go well.
But the Department of Health and Human Services has suffered more than its share of humiliations on this front. Last spring it produced “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which cited multiple nonexistent scientific studies after staffers misused AI. Later, the Food and Drug Administration unveiled an AI tool intended to speed up drug approvals, but the tool did not work.
The list continues to grow. The Washington Post reported:
A judge criticized the Department of Health and Human Services for citing nonexistent scientific evidence or potentially AI-generated citations to support sweeping changes to federal teen pregnancy prevention programs.
The Trump administration had said money Congress appropriated for such programs should avoid encouraging teen sexual activity and be used only for programs that promote abstinence and “body literacy.” The administration’s changes were challenged after HHS cut tens of millions in grants.
“While abstinence-only education may well be appropriate for some age groups or communities, the agency has offered no explanation or evidence to support its across-the-board mandate that only abstinence strategies be pursued,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper wrote in his opinion. “On the topic of body literacy, the notices (remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”
The jurist added that the department cited seven articles, two of which were apparently made up entirely and three of which did not exist in the journals to which they were attributed.
To date, HHS has not commented on the developments or the discomfiting pattern, and while it’s tempting to think the administration will have learned to stop misusing AI after this series of incidents, I have a hunch this list will grow again soon.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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