Musk’s AI chatbot Grok reportedly encouraged Trump to capture Venezuela’s president

In Brief

Posted:

2:08 PM PDT · October 1, 2026

In December 2025, about a month before the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, President Trump had a secret meeting with Elon Musk, Time magazine reports. This was roughly seven months after Musk left his role in the Trump administration at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

During this meeting, Trump “spent hours” talking to Musk’s Grok chatbot, including asking how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president, a source told Time. Just a few months earlier, in September, Trump began ordering U.S. military strikes against Venezuelan boats that Trump alleged were involved in drug trafficking.

People had apparently been turning to Grok asking about the boat strikes and political climate in Venezuela, as the Atlantic reported at the time. So Grok told Trump that Maduro was a “deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall,” Time reported.

When such celebrations indeed happened after the U.S. invaded on January 3, Trump apparently “came away thinking Grok was ingenious,” that source told Time.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that in June of this year, the Pentagon’s head of AI said that the military used Gov Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War.

While Grok isn’t the only AI model serving the DoD (OpenAI also has an agreement and Anthropic has been in a back-and-forth over how its models can be used for military intelligence and in modern warfare), Grok may become an even bigger favorite under this administration. Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey have been tapped to co-lead a study about how advanced technology is, and can be, used in battlefields.

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