America.gov AI Drops an 1,800-Word Minecraft Poem Every Time You Ask About Ender Dragon 📜

The U.S. government's newly launched AI chatbot at America.gov hides an unusual Easter egg behind any mention of Minecraft, prompting a roughly 1,800-word monologue that mimics an existential crisis. TechCrunch reporter Amanda Silberling discovered the bot rewrites Julian Gough's "End Poem," the text players see after defeating the Ender Dragon and entering the exit portal, recasting its cosmic lines into bureaucratic ones. In the passage TechCrunch published, the poem's signature love line becomes a line about a ZIP code.

The platform went live on Tuesday and aggregates information from about 29,000 federal websites, allowing users to ask about tasks such as booking a campsite, obtaining a passport, or replacing a Social Security card, according to the report. FedScoop first covered the launch. The current version directs users to government services, with plans to let people continue processes on the platform itself and track their progress next year. The chatbot is powered by Google's Gemini and Elon Musk's Grok, per CNBC, and Edward Coristine, the 20-year-old former DOGE engineer nicknamed "Big Balls," served as a lead engineer on the project.

No one has publicly stated who placed the poem or why. The White House has repeatedly drawn on cartoons and games for political messaging, often without rights-holder sign-off. In March it posted Pikachu art from Pokémon Pokopia with "Make America Great Again" text, and The Pokémon Company said it was not involved and no permission was granted. White House videos about the Iran strikes mixed in footage from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Dragon Ball, and Yu-Gi-Oh!'s official X account said no one tied to the manga or anime was involved. Halo's Master Chief voice actor Steve Downes demanded the White House remove his voice from a strike video he called "disgusting and juvenile war porn." After President Trump posted an AI video of himself as Naruto on Truth Social in June, Japan's economic security minister Kimi Onoda warned that misuse can damage a work's image, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. A fan petition against the practice has gathered roughly 24,000 signatures, while Bandai Namco and Studio Pierrot have not commented and no manga creator has been reported responding.