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Musk's AI chatbot Grok encouraged Trump to capture Venezuela's president

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Screenshot of Musk's AI chatbot Grok encouraged Trump to capture Venezuela's president

In December 2025, President Trump held a private meeting with Elon Musk and spent hours interacting with Musk’s Grok chatbot, asking how Venezuelans would respond if their president, Nicolás Maduro, were captured. Grok told him Maduro was a “deeply unpopular dictator” and predicted many Venezuelans would celebrate his downfall; similar celebrations followed after U.S. forces invaded Venezuela and captured Maduro on January 3. The encounter came months after Trump began ordering strikes on Venezuelan boats in September and about seven months after Musk left a White House role at the Department of Government Efficiency. Trump took away an impression that Grok’s analysis was ingenious.

The piece also documents growing military reliance on Musk’s models: in June the Pentagon’s head of AI said the military used Grok Gov to help deploy and strike targets during the Iran War, and Grok is now among several AI systems (alongside OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s offerings) engaged by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon recently tapped Musk and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey to co-lead a study on how advanced technologies should be used on battlefields, highlighting the expanding influence of commercial AI chatbots in national-security decision-making.

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