Musk’s AI chatbot Grok reportedly encouraged Trump to capture Venezuela’s president
TechCrunch Dominic-Madori Davis
Trump reportedly asked Grok how Venezuelans would react to Maduro’s capture. That’s the weird part: a chatbot may have helped shape a war call.
Based on reporting by TechCrunch, Dominic-Madori Davis — read the original for the full story.
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Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot reportedly played a strange role in one of the Trump administration’s most aggressive foreign policy moves. According to Time, Trump met secretly with Musk in December 2025 and spent hours talking with the chatbot before the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured Nicolás Maduro about a month later.
The source says Trump asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if their president were seized. Grok’s answer was blunt: Maduro was deeply unpopular, and many Venezuelans would likely cheer his downfall. When celebrations did break out after the January 3 invasion, Trump reportedly left the exchange thinking the bot was brilliant.
That all sounds absurd, but the broader pattern is not. Trump had already started ordering military strikes in September against Venezuelan boats he said were tied to drug trafficking, and people were already asking Grok about those strikes and Venezuela’s political mood, The Atlantic reported at the time.
Now Grok looks less like a novelty and more like a tool that has already found its way into military thinking. In June, the Pentagon’s head of AI said the military used Gov Grok to help deploy and strike targets during the Iran War. OpenAI has a deal with the Pentagon too, and Anthropic has been arguing over how its models can be used in warfare. Then the Pentagon announced this week that Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey would co-lead a study on how advanced technology can be used on battlefields.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the same old Silicon Valley trick wearing a fresh badge: sell the machine as smart, then act surprised when power asks it for a war opinion. The real story isn’t that Grok sounded clever; it’s that anyone in the room thought that was a good substitute for judgment. AI keeps getting invited closer to the trigger finger, and somehow the industry still pretends that’s just another product demo.
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