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TRUMP OFFICIALS BUILT AN AI TOOL TO TURBOCHARGE DEREGULATION  
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Freddy Brewster and Luke Goldstein
April 22, 2026
Jacobin
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_ Artificial intelligence has a history of making poor regulatory
decisions with disastrous effects on people’s lives. Newly released
documents show the Trump administration sought to deploy a powerful AI
tool to accelerate its deregulation spree. _

SweetREX, an AI tool developed by an Elon Musk acolyte, was
programmed to identify and eliminate rules that imposed costs on
private enterprises, limited business innovation, or used race-based
classifications. , (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

 

Trump officials planned to let artificial intelligence
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developed by one of Elon Musk
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soldiers undertake “regulation extermination” and even write new
federal statutes, according to newly released government documents
reviewed exclusively by the Lever.

The documents
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reveal for the first time how the AI program was pitched to government
employees and trained to target certain regulations to boost President
Donald Trump’s pro-business deregulation agenda.

According to the records, “SweetREX,” an AI tool developed by a
Musk acolyte, was programmed to identify and eliminate rules that
imposed costs on private enterprises, limited business innovation, or
used race-based classifications, among other criteria. Using such
parameters for guidance, the program could also process more than a
hundred thousand public comments in less than half an hour.

“The documents reveal, for the first time, the shortcuts this AI
tool takes when deciding whether a regulation is legally required and
whether its burdens outweigh benefits to the public,” said Daniel
McGrath, senior oversight counsel at the legal advocacy group
Democracy Forward, which obtained the records through a Freedom of
Information Act request.

The new documents detail how SweetREX was pitched to government
officials. It is not clear whether staffers went on to use SweetREX
during its government-purge operations over the past year or, if they
did, whether they tested or evaluated the program to ensure it
wasn’t making mistakes.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was devised and
then run by tech billionaire and Trump supporter Musk
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claims to have cut $215 billion
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through administrative downsizing, contract cancellations, and the
elimination
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of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Along with consuming gargantuan
amounts
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electricity and water, AI has a history of making poor regulatory
decisions
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disastrous effects on people’s lives.

The documents show how SweetREX, an AI program developed by University
of Chicago undergrad-turned-DOGE staffer Christopher Sweet, was
pitched to Department of Housing and Urban Development employees last
year as an “AI solution for regulation extermination.”

“The deregulation goal is to eliminate any regulatory provisions
that may represent potential overreach or impose unnecessary burdens
beyond what Congress has legislated,” the documents state.

According to a slideshow deck in the documents, SweetREX could quickly
identify which statutes “you want eliminated,” draft notices of
proposed rulemaking (NPRMs) related to the resulting government cuts,
read and organize potentially “hundreds of thousands” of public
comments submitted in response to those cuts, and draft final rules.

Doing so, promised SweetREX’s promoters, would cut “average hours
required per regulatory section” from thirty-six hours to less than
three.

According to the pitch deck, SweetREX would identify regulations to
eliminate based on nine different criteria, such as whether the rule
raises constitutional concerns, was based on unlawful delegation of
legislative power, poses high costs on private interests, limits
economic development, places undue burdens on business, or “treats
individuals/groups differently based on race.”

SweetREX’s promoters claimed that it could help agencies comply with
Trump’s multiple
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deregulation across departments, such as gutting environmental
regulations
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fossil fuel companies. The AI documents also claimed that SweetREX
software could provide “evidence-backed flags [to] protect you in
court.”

News that SweetREX was being developed to help slash government
regulations first emerged
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August. In October 2025, Democracy Forward sued
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multiple federal agencies to compel them to release documents
detailing how they used AI to achieve Trump’s deregulatory goals.

The documents reported here are a result of that lawsuit.

_This article was first published by the __Lever_
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investigative newsroom._

_Freddy Brewster is a reporter with the __Lever__. He has been
published in the __Los Angeles Times__, NBC News, CalMatters, the
__Lost Coast Outpost__, and more._

_Luke Goldstein is a reporter with the __Lever__. He is an
investigative journalist based in Washington, DC, who was most
recently a writing fellow at the __American Prospect__ and was with
the Open Markets Institute before that._

* Trump Administration
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* Deregulation
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* artificial intelligence
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