A leaked dossier urging top House Democrats to go to war with Elon Musk, Apple and other corporate giants has earned the scorn of party insiders – with some griping that the document is a sloppy, AI-influenced mess, The Post has learned.
Authored by progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative, the 181-page dossier outlines a plan to go after “politically corrupt corporate targets” with public hearings and subpoenas when Democrats take control of Congress early next year.
The Washington Sun, which first reported on the dossier this week, said Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees have been “reviewing” the dossier while crafting their agenda.
That’s despite the fact that the version circulating on the Hill is riddled with typos, editing notes, half-finished sections and casual references to Groundwork staffers. At least 83 sections of the dossier appear to be at least partially AI-generated, according to the results of a Pangram review provided to The Post.
In one particularly embarrassing blunder, pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly is named as a potential investigation target, even though a section on “how Eli Lilly makes health care more expensive” only says “TK.” Elsewhere, a section tacked on near the end of the dossier is titled “Blank Template” and appears to have been left in by mistake.
The goofs have led some DC sources who spoke to The Post to dismiss it as unserious or even counterproductive to the Democratic party’s goals.
The dossier “doesn’t seem like a real polished proposal to the Hill,” according to one K Street lobbyist familiar with the document who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity.
“I’ve not heard from any folks on the Hill who are utilizing this to put together their agenda on oversight,” the lobbyist added. “It seems like a lot of this might have been made with AI, and I would hope that anyone putting something like this together would not put together a product like that, with obvious AI input on it.”
The Democrats’ “blue tsunami” in the midterms has fueled some panic on Wall Street, with investors fretting that a Congressional crackdown will jam up the AI industry just as companies like OpenAI and Meta are spending billions on a nationwide AI infrastructure buildout.
Apple, Elon Musk’s Tesla and SpaceX, Amazon and Oracle are all named as targets, according to a copy of the dossier obtained by The Post. Other named entities include Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation, Paramount, GEO Group, World Liberty Financial, Trump Media, Intuit, the “nursing home industry” and energy companies, including the fossil fuel industry.
One current Hill aide, who spoke to The Post on condition of anonymity, expressed concern that the rushed memo would only complicate efforts to investigate companies who are causing harm to consumers.
“It’s shocking that anyone would send such an unserious mess,” the aide told The Post.
Representatives for Raskin and Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democratic member on the House Oversight Committee, did not return requests for comment.
Groundwork is led by executive director Lindsey Owens, who formerly served as a senior economic policy adviser to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).
The dossier notes that a potential probe into egg companies that contributed to an affordability crisis may not be the right political move. “Trump’s DOJ ultimately brought this case to light, so it may not be as useful for Democrats to champion this as other corporations,” the dossier says.
When reached for comment, Groundwork senior vice president Alex Jacquez said the dossier is a “living document” that was not intended for public consumption, but rather as a compilation of internal research to help Democratic committees that are going to be stretched thin. The errors and TKs in the document have since been corrected, he added.
Jacquez also denied that Groundwork relied on AI to write the dossier, noting that the nonprofit’s own Pangram report showed that it was 97% human-written and asserting that it had taken “hundreds of hours” of staff labor over the last six months. At the same time, he acknowledged that staffers used AI while conducting research.
“We are fully in service of getting the Democratic caucus in the House and the Senate everything they need to deliver what people said that they wanted on Tuesday – which is relief from crushing high prices and a stop to the corruption that enables this ripoff,” Jacquez said. “They believe the system is rigged and we need to unrig it.”
The document is riddled with “TKs” – a shorthand used by editors to indicate sentences that need to be filled in by the author – such as “How TK Company Makes Consumer Goods More Expensive.”
One section outlining research on “corporate wrongdoing targets” includes a caveat noting it is “not exhaustive and not yet complete.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, seemed to distance himself from the dossier in a statement to the Washington Sun.
“We’re not targeting particular corporations,” Raskin told the outlet. “We’re targeting systems and networks of corruption, and to the extent corporations are involved, they are subject to the oversight project of Congress and our subpoena authority like everyone else.”
The section marked “Blank Template” contains instructions on how to outline grievances against particular companies and online shopping firm Instacart used as an example.
“This is disappointing to see days after a big Democratic win,” one former Hill staffer said. “Oversight staff will need help given the scale of the work that needs doing. AI slop for headlines isn’t helping.”
As The Washington Sun noted, some Democrats are concerned that the party risks repeating past mistakes by going overboard targeting individual companies – such as when the Biden administration’s adversarial relationship with corporate America led many CEOs to embrace President Trump.
Groundwork’s dossier selected targets based in part on whether they’ve fostered close ties to Trump, such as by making donations to his White House ballroom, and whether they received benefits in the form of tax breaks or looser regulations.
It outlines specific Congressional investigations that should be pursued. One would take tech CEOs to task over “the cost of data centers to American households,” and suggests targeting Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and other key tech executives.
Another would grill Musk and Palantir boss Alex Karp over claims that they “paid $0 in federal income tax on billions in US profits in 2025.”
The Sun’s report said the dossier has been reviewed by “[Sen. Elizabeth] Warren, the heads of the House Democratic caucus, party leadership, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a half-dozen chiefs of staff for incoming senators.”
Nonetheless, some insiders remain skeptical that the document will actually play much of a role in shaping the party’s agenda.
“My clients are certainly preparing for oversight after the elections – they were preparing for it before the elections – but I’m not concerned that this document is what’s driving the congressional agenda,” the K Street lobbyist added.
