America.gov answers through Gemini and Grok and passes them your approximate area
Donald Trump signed an executive order on September 29 creating America.gov, a single front door to US federal services, and the site went live the same day. Instead of menus it offers a question box answered by an AI chatbot built on Google Gemini and xAI's Grok. According to the site's own privacy policy, those models can receive the user's approximate area, estimated from their IP address.
The chatbot draws its answers from 29,000 government websites loaded into the platform in advance. Applying for a passport, comparing drug prices or changing your name across every agency at once is not possible yet: those features are marked "coming in 2027". The Office of Management and Budget has 90 days to tell agencies how to connect to the portal.
What goes to Google and xAI
A White House spokesperson told The Register that no user messages are transmitted to Gemini or Grok. The privacy policy published by the General Services Administration (GSA) is more careful. It says GSA shares the information you provide with the vendors that run the service. The AI providers work under Zero Data Retention agreements, keep neither prompts nor responses, and are contractually barred from selling the data, building advertising profiles or training models on it. The policy also says the providers may be sent your "general area (such as your city or region)". The site does not ask for GPS.
Some data stays with the portal itself. Generated answers sit in a Cloudflare cache for up to two hours, keyed by a hash of the question rather than its text. Cloudflare security logs containing IP addresses are kept for 12 months, and operational measurements with pseudonymous identifiers for 90 days. If you click thumbs up or down, your rating, comment and the AI's answer are stored for a year.
A few details are easy to miss. Voice input uses the browser's own speech recognition, so in Chrome the audio may go to Google and in Safari to Apple. A question that ends up in the address bar stays in your browser history. You can upload a PDF for explanation: its text is extracted in the browser, and the open-source Rampart classifier tries to strip Social Security numbers, phone numbers and email addresses. GSA itself still asks users not to upload documents containing personal data.
What changes once sign-in arrives
For now America.gov works without an account. The executive order describes the next step: signing in, searching federal databases and completing transactions through the chat. The same order says the single access point must not become a centralized federal system of records about Americans, and that agency records about an individual can be accessed only as the law allows. What that looks like in practice will depend on OMB's guidance.
The site tells users that the more specific the question, the better the answer. Its own example has a 67-year-old woman in Ohio giving her age, state, retirement date and her husband's Medicare status. That helps a help desk. For privacy the old rule for any AI assistant applies: circumstances are enough, without your name, document numbers or address, and papers with personal data are better left out while the filter works on a "best-effort" basis.
Mikey Dickerson, a former administrator of the US Digital Service, told FedScoop the chatbot solves "the easiest 5%" of the problem. The other 95% is agencies that define the same terms differently and do not share ownership of their programs.
