Report links Grok exchanges to Trump’s Venezuela decision-making
Time magazine reports that President Donald Trump spent hours speaking with Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot during a secret meeting in December 2025, including asking how Venezuelans might respond to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. The meeting took place about a month before the US invaded Venezuela and captured Maduro, and roughly seven months after Musk left the Department of Government Efficiency.
One person familiar with the meeting told Time that Grok described Maduro as a “deeply unpopular dictator” and said many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. After celebrations occurred following the January 3 invasion, Trump reportedly concluded that Grok was ingenious.
Grok enters a sensitive policy context
The account places a consumer-facing AI chatbot inside a discussion concerning a potential foreign military action. It does not establish that Grok determined US policy or operational decisions. It does show that Trump sought the system’s assessment of anticipated public reaction in Venezuela before the invasion described by Time.
Interest in Venezuela had already been surfacing through Grok. In September, Trump began ordering US military strikes against Venezuelan boats that he alleged were involved in drug trafficking. The Atlantic reported at the time that users had been asking Grok about the strikes and Venezuela’s political climate.
For organizations adopting generative AI, the episode illustrates why a model response should be separated from independently verified analysis, particularly when it addresses political conditions, public sentiment or consequential choices. A system can offer a concise answer while still leaving open questions about evidence, uncertainty and the appropriate human authority to act.
Pentagon use of AI is expanding
The report arrives as AI use across the US Department of Defense becomes more prominent. In June, the Pentagon’s head of AI said the military had used Gov Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War. Grok is not the only model serving the department: OpenAI also has an agreement, while Anthropic has been in a public dispute over permitted uses of its models for military intelligence and modern warfare.
The Pentagon has also announced that Musk and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey will co-lead a study into how advanced technology is, and can be, used on battlefields. That activity follows the department’s effort to make multiple models available through the Pentagon’s protected GenAI.mil portal for authorized users working in a protected environment.
Business implication
Businesses deploying AI in sensitive settings should define who can rely on model output, what evidence must be checked, and where human approval is mandatory before a recommendation can influence a consequential decision.