Grok Chatbot Told Trump Venezuelans Would Welcome Maduro's Capture, Report Says
President Donald Trump consulted Elon Musk's Grok chatbot during a private meeting roughly a month before the United States invaded Venezuela and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, according to a report by Time magazine.
The meeting took place in December 2025, about seven months after Musk stepped away from his post at the Department of Government Efficiency in the Trump administration.
Citing a source, the report said Trump spent hours engaging with the Grok chatbot during that gathering. Among the questions he put to the AI tool was how Venezuelans might react if their president were captured.
Earlier, in September, Trump had started ordering U.S. military strikes on Venezuelan vessels that he claimed were tied to drug trafficking.
At the time, people were reportedly asking Grok about the boat strikes and the political situation in Venezuela, as The Atlantic noted. According to Time, Grok's response to Trump described Maduro as a deeply unpopular dictator and suggested that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall.
After the U.S. invasion on January 3, such celebrations did occur, and the source told Time that Trump came away thinking Grok was ingenious.
The episode comes amid growing use of AI tools in military affairs. In June of this year, the Pentagon's head of AI said the military had used Gov Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War.
Grok is not the only AI model working with the Department of Defense. OpenAI also has an agreement with the department, and Anthropic has been engaged in back-and-forth discussions over how its models can be used for military intelligence and in modern warfare.
Still, Grok could become an even bigger favorite in this administration. Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril's Palmer Luckey have been selected to co-lead a study examining how advanced technology is and can be used on battlefields.
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