In December 2025, according to an account in Time magazine, Donald Trump sat down privately with Elon Musk and put a question to a chatbot: what would Venezuelans do if the United States captured their president, Nicolas Maduro? The question went to Grok, the chatbot built by Musk’s company xAI, Time reported. A little more than a month later, a U.S. military operation took Maduro out of the country.
The account is a narrow one, and it rests on a single source. Time’s report is drawn from an interview with a person close to Trump. The White House and xAI both declined to comment on the details of the conversation. Neither has confirmed that the exchange took place, and no transcript or log has been made public. The sequence, as Time describes it, is an allegation about what was said in a private room, not an established fact.
Grok is xAI’s flagship product, the chatbot Musk founded the company in 2023 to build as a rival to OpenAI and others. It is built into X, the social platform Musk owns, and it has been positioned as a model with fewer guardrails than its better-known competitors. Musk himself is one of Trump’s closest advisers, having helped lead the administration’s effort to cut federal spending, and his companies do business with the government. That proximity is part of why the report matters: the picture it paints is of a president whose private counsel now includes a machine built by a friend and adviser.
Maduro has governed Venezuela since 2013, when he took over after the death of Hugo Chavez. His grip on power has been in dispute for years. The 2024 presidential election was widely contested; Maduro was declared the winner by the electoral authority while the opposition and much of the international community, including the United States, called the result fraudulent and pointed to opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez as the victor. Washington does not recognize Maduro as the legitimate president and has layered sanctions on his government and its officials.
The United States has gone further than sanctions. In 2020 the Justice Department indicted Maduro and other Venezuelan officials on narcoterrorism charges and posted a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest. For years he has been one of the most prominent targets of American law enforcement in the hemisphere.
The country the question concerned has been unraveling for years. Venezuela’s economy collapsed under Maduro, oil production withered, and millions of citizens left, one of the largest migrations in the hemisphere’s recent history. Any operation to remove him would have carried enormous risk of violence and instability, which is precisely the kind of judgment the reported question seems to have outsourced, in part, to a machine.
What Time describes is different in kind: a president consulting a large language model to game out how a foreign population would react to a military action against a sitting head of state. That is not using a chatbot to draft a memo or summarize a brief. It treats the machine as a source of strategic and political judgment about a sovereign country, and it puts that judgment inside the room where a consequential decision was being weighed.
If the account is accurate, it would go a step beyond the ways governments have used AI so far. Agencies already use language models to summarize intelligence, draft regulations and sort data. Asking one to predict how a population would react to the arrest of its leader is a more consequential test, one with no obvious precedent in the public record, and one that raises the question of what weight such an answer should carry.
The report does not claim the chatbot’s answer drove the decision. It records a question and, weeks later, an operation. The gap between the two is left unexplained. Whether Grok’s response shaped anything, or whether the query was a stray curiosity recalled later by a single person, is not established by the account. Both the White House and xAI have chosen not to say.
The episode lands on top of a longer debate about how close Musk’s companies sit to government power. xAI has raised enormous sums and scaled quickly, and Grok’s place inside X makes it one of the most widely used AI systems in the country. Critics have asked for years whether a president so closely tied to a technology executive should also be leaning on that executive’s products for counsel. The Time account, if it holds up, would be the most direct example yet.
Time has not published the full interview, and the magazine has not said what Grok answered. The detail surfaced inside a wider story about the relationship between Trump and Musk, where it sits as one episode among many. That placement is itself a caveat: a single recollection within a long narrative is a thin foundation, and the two parties best placed to confirm or deny it have said nothing.
For now, the story stands where Time put it: one source, two parties declining to comment, and a question about a chatbot asked in the weeks before a U.S. operation removed a foreign leader. What Grok actually said in reply remains unknown.
