US Government's New AI Chatbot Has a Weird Minecraft Secret

In brief

• America.gov's chatbot answers Minecraft prompts with a roughly 1,800-word rewrite of the game's End Poem, according to TechCrunch.
• The behavior is an easter egg rather than a hallucination, but TechCrunch says it doesn't know who added it.
• The site launched Sept. 29 and pulls together about 29,000 government websites, with process-completion features planned for 2027.

Ask the U.S. government's brand-new AI chatbot about Minecraft, and it stops sounding like a help desk. It starts sounding like it's having an existential crisis.

The bot lives at America.gov, which launched on Tuesday. FedScoop reported that it brings together information from roughly 29,000 government websites, so users can ask about things like booking a campsite, getting a passport, or replacing a Social Security card.

Mention Minecraft, though, and TechCrunch's Amanda Silberling found it delivers a monologue of roughly 1,800 words. It looks like a meltdown. It isn't.

The text is a rewrite of the Minecraft "End Poem," written by Irish author Julian Gough, which the game shows after you defeat the Ender Dragon and step into the exit portal.

The government version keeps the original piece’s structure and swaps the cosmic stuff for paperwork. In the passage TechCrunch published, the poem's signature love line turns into a line about a ZIP code.