By Kenneth Li
(Reuters) -Thomson Reuters said on Thursday its business with the U.S. Department of Defense was “inaccurately represented,” in response to accusations on social media by Elon Musk and President Donald Trump that the company played a role in “large scale social deception” for the government.
The contract in question was a four-year, $9 million award, beginning in 2018 during Trump’s first term and ending in 2022, between the U.S. Department of Defense and a division of the Toronto-based content and technology company called Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS). The contract was intended to protect the U.S. government from social engineering, which is a form of cyber threat in which people are tricked into divulging sensitive information.
Spokesperson Tabatha Thompson of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the research and development arm of the U.S. military, which funded the contract, said, “Thomson Reuters Special Services (TRSS) was competitively selected to serve as the evaluator to test the defensive tools. … They (Thomson Reuters) assessed the effectiveness of our defensive tools.”
Trump demanded that Reuters repay the U.S. government in a Truth Social post on Thursday morning: “DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study ‘large scale social deception.’ GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!”
Thomson Reuters said TRSS is a separate U.S. legal entity governed by an independent board of directors. Reuters, an independent global news organization, adheres to its own Trust Principles, which govern its journalism standards.
“TRSS has provided software and information services to U.S. government agencies across successive administrations for decades, to assist in identifying and preventing fraud, supporting public safety, and advancing justice,” Steve Rubley, CEO of Thomson Reuters Special Services, said in a statement in response to questions about the nature of the Defense Department contract.
Musk, the White House and the Defense Department did not reply to a request for comment.
Thomson Reuters issued its statement after Tesla CEO Musk, Trump, the Hungarian government and Russian state media accused the company on social media of being paid by the U.S. government to play a role in “large scale social deception.”
The scrutiny of this contract, named “ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD),” comes as Musk has spearheaded an effort to cut waste from government agencies, called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Members of the group have scrutinized personnel and payment information in government computer systems and helped dismantle two U.S. agencies.
The contract was awarded to TRSS by the Air Force Research Laboratory and funded by DARPA.
DARPA told Reuters that the ASED program, which ended in 2022, “was to develop tools to protect people from social engineering attacks.”
The term “Large Scale Social Deception” was the name of the “red team” proposal, DARPA said, referring to work by Thomson Reuters Special Services to simulate an adversarial attack by pretending to be the enemy.
Thomson Reuters Special Services has been awarded more than $120 million in contracts over multiple federal agencies dating back to 2010. These agencies include the Defense Department, which has awarded more than $60 million in contracts, and the Department of Homeland Security, which has awarded $55.85 million over time.
(Reporting by Kenneth Li in New York; Editing by Anna Driver)
