Report: Trump's hours-long chat with Musk's Grok preceded capture of Venezuela's Maduro

According to a Time magazine report, in December 2025 — roughly a month before the United States invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro — Donald Trump held a secret meeting with Elon Musk. The meeting came about seven months after Musk departed his role at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) within the Trump administration.

A source told Time that during the meeting, Trump spent hours talking with Grok, the AI chatbot developed by Musk's company, including asking it how Venezuelans would respond to their president being captured. Just months earlier, in September, Trump had begun ordering U.S. military strikes on Venezuelan boats he claimed were involved in drug trafficking. As The Atlantic reported at the time, members of the public had also been turning to Grok with questions about the strikes and the political situation in Venezuela.

Grok told Trump that Maduro was a "deeply unpopular dictator" and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall, per Time's report. When the U.S. invaded on January 3 and similar celebrations did occur, the source said Trump came away believing Grok was "ingenious."

Grok's expanding military role

That reaction may explain why, this past June, the Pentagon's head of AI said the military had used Gov Grok to help deploy and strike targets during the Iran War. Grok isn't the only AI model used by the Department of Defense — OpenAI has its own agreement, while Anthropic has been negotiating how its models can be used for military intelligence and modern warfare — but Grok could become an even bigger favorite under the current administration.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril's Palmer Luckey had been chosen to co-lead a study on how advanced technology is being, and could be, used on the battlefield.