Time: Trump reportedly spent hours talking to Grok before Maduro's capture

Time magazine reports that US President Donald Trump held a secret meeting with Elon Musk in December 2025, about a month before the US invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro. The meeting came roughly seven months after Musk left the administration, where he led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

During the meeting, Trump "spent hours" talking to Grok, the chatbot from Musk's AI company xAI, and asked, among other things, how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president, a source told Time.

What Grok told Trump

In September 2025, Trump began ordering US military strikes on Venezuelan boats that he alleged were involved in drug trafficking. As The Atlantic reported at the time, people had been turning to Grok with questions about those strikes and about Venezuela's political climate. According to Time, Grok told Trump that Maduro was a "deeply unpopular dictator" and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall.

When those celebrations materialized after the January 3 invasion, Trump "came away thinking Grok was ingenious," the source told Time.

Gov Grok and the military

Grok is already in military use: in June, the Pentagon's head of AI said the military used Gov Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War.

Grok is not the only AI model serving the Department of Defense: OpenAI also has an agreement, while Anthropic has been in a back-and-forth over how its models can be used for military intelligence and modern warfare.

A new Pentagon study

Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril's Palmer Luckey have been tapped to co-lead a study on how advanced technology is, and can be, used in battlefields.