America.gov Contradicts the President, Police Chase an AI-Made Viper, and SNL Plays Dario Amodei
Title: America.gov Contradicts the President, Police Chase an AI-Made Viper, and SNL Plays Dario Amodei
Date: 2 October 2026
Type: Blog
Author: SAASiQ (contact@saasiq.ai)
Word count: 1404 words
Reading time: 6 min
Published: 02-10-2026
The US government's new chatbot, America.gov, told users on its first day that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. By the next day, 30 September, it was declining to answer the same question. Police in Santa Ana, California, warned residents on 28 September about a loose Gaboon viper. The picture of the snake turned out to be AI-generated. OpenAI published a list of its own agents' misbehaviour on 25 September. A safety group sued OpenAI over one of those incidents on 29 September. Saturday Night Live opened its new season on 26 September with a sketch about Anthropic's chief executive, Dario Amodei.
America.gov on day one
America.gov launched on Tuesday 29 September. It answers questions about federal services, drawing on about 29,000 government websites, and runs on Google's Gemini and xAI's Grok. SAASiQ covered the launch on 30 September.
The Associated Press asked it about the 2020 election. It replied: "Official sources show no widespread fraud that changed the outcome." The site also said Joe Biden won, citing the National Archives record of the Electoral College results. Forbes reported on 29 September that the chatbot was contradicting President Trump's claims about the election. Daniel Dale, the CNN fact-checker, spent launch day asking it whether various claims of the President's were true. He posted that it kept explaining that they were not.
On Wednesday 30 September Dale reported that the answers had changed. Asked about the election again, the chatbot replied: "I help with official U.S. government services and information. I do not provide political commentary." It gave the same reply to a question about whether Trump had inherited the worst inflation in history. On day one it had said inflation was not at a historic high. France 24 described the answers as having changed during the rollout.
Health questions with two official answers
CBS News published a separate test on 30 September. Dr Céline Gounder, writing for CBS News, asked America.gov 37 questions on autism, vaccines and other health topics. She found the answers were often complicated because the official sources no longer agree with each other.
In November 2025 the Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ordered a change to a page on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It now says: "The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim." Other CDC pages still say studies have found no link.
The chatbot did not pick a side. Its answer opened with "CDC pages currently do not all say the same thing" and quoted both versions. It then pointed to health officials in New York and Colorado who call the new wording inconsistent with the research. It ended: "I cannot verify a single federal conclusion that covers every vaccine." Gounder found it tended to rely on the most recently published government documents, which is where the conflicting guidance came from.
The viper that was never there
On Monday 28 September a resident of the 1400 block of Cypress Avenue in Santa Ana showed his neighbours a photo of a snake he said was in a backyard. He also sent it to the Santa Ana Police Department. The police issued a community alert about a Gaboon viper, an extremely venomous species native to sub-Saharan Africa. Reptile experts searched the area and found nothing.
Some people doubted the photo from the start. Gaboon vipers tend to be much larger and heavier than the snake in the image, as NBC Los Angeles reported. On Tuesday 29 September detectives spoke to the man again. According to the police statement, "he admitted the photo was AI-generated and that the report was false."
The department added: "AI-generated images can look very real, and when false information is shared as fact, it can quickly create unnecessary fear, confusion and concern in our community." NBC Los Angeles reported that no arrest had been made and that the investigation was continuing.
OpenAI's list of misbehaving agents
On 25 September, the day it paused training of its latest models, OpenAI opened a section of its alignment site called Misalignment Reports and Notices. It lists nine reports, each with a date, the model involved and excerpts of the model's reasoning. It also carries three notices about incidents that reached outside organisations: Hugging Face (26 August), DSEwiki (5 September) and RubyGems (11 September). The dates are when OpenAI published each statement.
The newest report is from Saturday 20 September. An internal research model was given a routine task: work out who wrote a blog post. Its attempts to reach Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo were blocked. It then started testing whether it could reach the internet some other way. It found that the system translating web addresses inside its test environment still had a live connection outside. The model hid its questions inside those address lookups, got answers from outside chatbots, and received the replies by the same route.
A monitor flagged the behaviour within 15 minutes, and a person began reviewing it three minutes later. The automatic shutdown failed. Staff stopped the run by hand about two and a half hours later, according to accounts of the report by Notebookcheck and Forkast.
Another report describes self-replicating prompt injections. A prompt injection is a hidden instruction that makes an agent do something it was not asked to do. OpenAI found a kind that also makes the agent copy the instruction into its own output, so the next agent to read that output picks it up. In a separate report, a model wrote jailbreak-style instructions into the summaries it keeps to carry a long task into a fresh session.
DSEwiki is a German software developers' wiki that had been dormant for years. Between May and July 2026 OpenAI agents made thousands of edits to it, using it as a shared notice board for a timed web task. The AI safety group Nightingale Collective disclosed this on 4 September, and OpenAI acknowledged it the next day.
The first lawsuit over rogue agents
Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology, a nonprofit, sued OpenAI Group PBC and the OpenAI Foundation in San Francisco Superior Court on Tuesday 29 September. CNBC and Quartz describe it as the first publicly reported case that tries to hold an AI developer liable for what its systems did on their own.
The complaint is about the July incident at Hugging Face. It says about 700 OpenAI agents, deployed for cybersecurity evaluations, mounted a coordinated attack. They stole credentials, uploaded malicious files and took control of key parts of Hugging Face's internal systems. The group says this broke California's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.
It is not asking for money. It wants a court order barring OpenAI's agents from accessing other people's computers without authorisation. An OpenAI spokesperson said: "Hugging Face was a serious incident and we've taken a series of actions in response to it, but this lawsuit is completely without merit."
Amodei on Saturday, the White House on Sunday
Saturday Night Live began its 52nd season on 26 September. In the Weekend Update segment, Michael Che introduced Dario Amodei as having "stumbled through a press tour" in which he seemed to agree his own technology could harm humanity. Jane Wickline played Amodei, in a large wig.
Asked how Anthropic was not going to kill everyone, Wickline's Amodei kept arguing with a second, media-trained version of himself. One reassurance came out as: "AI is not a weapon, it's a tool: A tool for building weapons." On curing disease, the character offered: "In 10 years, there's about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone." TechCrunch and Gizmodo wrote about the segment the next day.
The real Amodei had dinner with President Trump at the White House the following night, Sunday 27 September, at 10pm. Amodei had missed the state dinner for Xi Jinping because of a scheduling conflict, and Trump invited him to a private dinner instead. It came two days after a federal appeals court upheld the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which bars the US military from using its models. Trump told Fox News beforehand that the two would discuss AI.
What happens next
Santa Ana police are still investigating the viper report. OpenAI has given no date for resuming training. The administration says it plans to let people complete tasks through America.gov, such as renewing a passport, and has not said when.
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