AI & Models
Grok chatbot reportedly swayed Trump's call to capture Maduro
Grok reportedly told Trump that Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro was deeply unpopular and that his downfall would likely be celebrated, before the U.S. invaded and captured him in January.
In December 2025, about a month before the United States invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, President Trump held a secret meeting with Elon Musk, Time magazine reports. The meeting came roughly seven months after Musk left his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the Trump administration. During the meeting, Trump reportedly “spent hours” talking with Musk’s Grok chatbot, including asking it how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president, a source told Time.
The conversation followed months of rising U.S. military pressure on Venezuela. Starting in September, Trump had ordered military strikes on Venezuelan boats that he alleged were involved in drug trafficking. Around that time, The Atlantic reported that people had apparently been turning to Grok with questions about the strikes and the broader political climate in Venezuela. According to Time, Grok told Trump that Maduro was a “deeply unpopular dictator” and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall.
When celebrations did follow the U.S. invasion on January 3, Trump apparently “came away thinking Grok was ingenious,” the same source told Time. That apparent vote of confidence lines up with the Pentagon’s own growing use of the chatbot: in June, the Pentagon’s head of AI said the military had used a government version of the tool, Gov Grok, to help deploy and strike targets during the Iran war.
Grok is not the only AI model serving the Department of Defense. OpenAI also has an agreement with the Pentagon, and Anthropic has been in a back-and-forth with the department over how its models can be used for military intelligence and in modern warfare. But Grok’s position with the current administration could keep strengthening: earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey have been tapped to co-lead a study on how advanced technology is, and can be, used on the battlefield.
Why it matters
Grok’s apparent credibility with Trump — reinforced by the Pentagon’s own use of a government version of the tool in the Iran war — suggests the chatbot could keep gaining ground inside the U.S. military and administration, especially with Musk ally Palmer Luckey now co-leading a Pentagon study on battlefield technology. That puts Grok in more direct competition with OpenAI and Anthropic for a role in the defense sector, where the stakes of a model’s outputs are considerably higher than in ordinary consumer use.