Trump consulted Musk's Grok before Venezuela invasion, Time reports

The article traces a chain of events that runs from political advice to battlefield deployment. In December 2025, about a month before the U.S. invaded Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, Trump held a secret meeting with Elon Musk, roughly seven months after Musk left his role at the Department of Government Efficiency. During that meeting, Trump spent hours talking to Musk's Grok chatbot, asking how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of their president. Grok told him that Maduro was a 'deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall,' and when celebrations did happen after the January 3 invasion, Trump reportedly came away thinking Grok was ingenious.

The article places this in a broader pattern: months earlier, in September, Trump began ordering U.S. military strikes against Venezuelan boats that he alleged were involved in drug trafficking, and The Atlantic reported at the time that people had been turning to Grok asking about those strikes and Venezuela's political climate. By June of this year, 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 DoD — OpenAI also has an agreement, and Anthropic has been in a back-and-forth over how its models can be used for military intelligence and in modern warfare.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril's Palmer Luckey have been tapped to co-lead a study about how advanced technology is, and can be, used in battlefields. Whether Grok becomes an even bigger favorite under this administration may hinge on how that study frames the role of such tools, and on whether the military's reported use of Gov Grok continues.