WASHINGTON Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they'd accomplished over the past week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary or not, according to three sources with knowledge of the system. The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate, and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someones work is mission-critical or not.The U.S. Office of Personnel Management emails were sent out to federal workers Saturday, shortly after Musk wrote in a post on X that all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.The OPM email did not mention the resignation threat, but said: Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. Please do not send any classified information, links, or attachments. Deadline is this Monday at 11:59pm EST.The reason the email requested no links or attachments was because of the plan to send the information to the AI system, the sources said.A request for comment from OPM as to whether or not humans will be involved in reviewing the responses was not answered immediately. The White House declined to comment.In an email to its workforce on Monday, the Justice Department said that during a meeting with the interagency Chief Human Capital Officers Council, OPM informed agencies that employee responses to the email are voluntary. OPM also clarified that despite what Musk had posted, a non-response to the email does not equate to a resignation, the email said. The directive was facing pushback from unions, workers and even some agencies since it was sent, but the effort was praised by President Donald Trump earlier Monday.I thought it was great, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, where he was meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron. "We have people that dont show up to work and nobody even knows if they work for the government so by asking the question tell us what you did this week, what he's doing is saying are you actually working. And then, if you dont answer, like, youre sort of semi-fired or you're fired," he said, claiming without providing evidence that "a lot of people are not answering because they don't even exist." "There was a lot of genius in sending it," Trump said. "If people dont respond, its very possible that there is no such person or theyre not working.A coalition of unions and groups that have been fighting the Trump administration's mass layoffs of probationary workers charge the effort was unlawful. They amended their lawsuit against the U.S. Office of Personnel Management over the weekend to add a claim involving the OPM email directing workers to justify their workweek. The lawsuit charges that the administration didn't follow proper procedure for such an order and should be voided by a judge. "The mass firings ordered by OPM are illegal and betray the trust of countless federal employees. The patronizing demand that federal workers still on the job have to justify themselves by enumerating five accomplishments just adds insult to injury. That too is against the law," lawyer Norm Eisen said in a statement on behalf of the plaintiffs.Musk has been tasked by Trump with reducing the size of the government, and the email is seen as part of his push to reduce the federal workforce by as much as 10 percent. Some agencies, including ones led by close Trump allies, have told their employees to ignore the directive.Justice Department employees were informed earlier Monday that they did not need to respond to the message, according to emails seen by NBC News. Due to the confidential and sensitive nature of the Departments work, DOJ employees do not need to respond to the email from OPM. If you have already responded to this email, no further action is needed, read one email sent by Assistant Attorney General for Administration Jolene Ann Lauria.FBI DirectorKash Patelinstructed employees over the weekend to pause any responses to the email, and said his agency would do its own review. Employees of theThe Department of Agriculture also sent out an unsigned email to employees informing them that any response to the email "is voluntary and not required." The email was also sent to an unknown amount of judicial branch employees, including judges and court staffers. Spokespeople for federal courts in Manhattan and the Northern District of Illinois confirmed to NBC News that some people had gotten the message.Julie Hodek, a spokesperson for the Northern District of Illinois, also confirmed the email and said the courts chief judge and clerk communicated with the staff that as we are judiciary employees, our policies and procedures are governed by the Judicial Conference of the United States and our local court HR handbooks.A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York said personnel there had been directed not to respond to the email.Managers within the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday sent employees model responses to the email to make it easier for them. As empathy for their staff, they sent examples, said one agency employee who shared two of the managers own responses with NBC News. The employee asked NBC not to publish the managers responses in full out of fear of reprisal.Officials at the Health and Human Services Department and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services directed employees to respond by the deadlineAn email sent to Department of Transportation employees and obtained by NBC News instructed them to respond to OPMs weekend email asking for five bullet points of their work. The message also asked employees to exclude any classified info from their responses. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy embraced the challenge himself in a post on social media.Musk appears to be following the same playbook he used when he bought Twitter, which he renamed X.Musk began his tenure there with massive layoffs, asking employees to commit to "Extremely hardcore" work in an email titled "A Fork in the Road" or be fired. The email subject line is the same as the email sent out to federal employees by the Office of Personnel Management offering buyouts in January. About 75,000 federal employees took the deal.Twitter employees who stayed were then asked to print out pages of code they'd written from the last month and prepare to present the work to Musk personally. The code reviews reportedly were abandoned, and instead, managers were asked to rank their employees, according to The Verge. Musk and DOGE's access to government data and information has become a central point of friction between the group and its critics. In at least 11 lawsuits, plaintiffs have argued that DOGE has flouted laws and rules around data and privacy. Some of the lawsuits have referenced allegations that DOGE is using artificial intelligence to analyze and process government data. The Washington Post reported in February that DOGE was using artificial intelligence to analyze spending at the Education Department, citing two people familiar with the project.