LLMHigh
DOGE Reportedly Relied on Unvetted ChatGPT Outputs in Canceling National Endowment for the Humanities Grants
- Occurred
- Apr 2, 2025
- Published
- Mar 7, 2026
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staff reportedly fed National Endowment for the Humanities grant descriptions into ChatGPT to determine whether projects were "DEI," then allegedly used those outputs to help compile a list of grants to terminate. Beginning in April 2025, NEH canceled awards and clawed back funding, reportedly disrupting humanities organizations and projects nationwide after officials allegedly relied on a purportedly flawed, insufficiently vetted AI screening process.
Developers
- OpenAI
- Chatbot developers
- Large language model developers
Deployers
- Nate Cavanaugh (DOGE)
- Justin Fox (DOGE)
- Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
Harmed parties
- Scholars
- National Endowment for the Humanities grantees
- Humanities organizations
- Epistemic integrity
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Unvetted LLM outputs used to cancel government grants causing significant disruption and potential financial harm.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8