America.gov rewrites Minecraft's End Poem as a story about federal paperwork

The US government's new public AI chatbot has an unexpected habit: when a user asks it about Minecraft, America.gov answers with a long poem about federal paperwork. The behaviour is not a malfunction, according to reporters who tested it, but a rewritten version of the “End Poem” that plays after a player finishes Minecraft.

A bureaucratic remix

The chatbot launched on America.gov on Tuesday, built with help from Google and SpaceXAI; Engadget reports it runs at least partially on Google's Gemini platform. When a user types “Play Minecraft” into the prompt, the bot returns the End Poem, the philosophical monologue written by Julian Gough for the end of the game, but replaces its “universe” lines with “the republic”. In the remix the republic tells the reader they are the public “tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own Code”, and the text closes with “you are the constituent. Wake up. The form is still there.” According to TechCrunch, the full monologue runs roughly 1,800 words.

The bot denies writing it

Engadget notes that the bot then refused to acknowledge it had written the poem, even when a user showed it a PDF of the conversation. The discovery was made by Bluesky user @eva.computer, whose thread describes other odd exchanges: the bot declining to discuss Mississippi's child marriage laws or whether it is legal to marry an eagle. It does have lighter touches. A Konami code switches the site into a 1980s mode, and typing “hotdog” turns the search bar into a hotdog.

Why it matters

For a government tool meant to give constituents reliable information, the episode is a reminder that large language models produce text probabilistically and cannot reliably account for their own outputs. TechCrunch notes the chatbot has been difficult to jailbreak and that it still says Joe Biden won the 2020 election, a fact President Donald Trump denies. Trump has said 20-year-old programmer Edward Coristine was a lead engineer on the project.

The story sits between an easter egg and a reliability question: the poem carries a real poet's DNA, but the denial that followed is harder to explain.

Sources: TechCrunch · Engadget