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

Time magazine reports that in December 2025, roughly a month before the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, President Trump held a secret meeting with Elon Musk. The meeting took place about seven months after Musk left his role in the Trump administration at the Department of Government Efficiency, according to the report.

During the meeting, a source told Time that Trump spent hours talking to Musk's Grok chatbot, including asking how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president. Grok told Trump that Maduro was a "deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall," Time reported.

In September, months before the meeting, Trump began ordering U.S. military strikes against Venezuelan boats that he alleged were involved in drug trafficking, according to the report. The Atlantic reported at the time that people had been turning to Grok asking about the boat strikes and the political climate in Venezuela.

After celebrations occurred following the U.S. invasion on January 3, the source told Time that Trump came away thinking Grok was ingenious.

In June of this year, the Pentagon's head of AI said the military used Gov Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War, the report notes. Grok is not the only AI model serving the Department of Defense; 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.

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 on battlefields.