Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the Oval Office in May 2025, months before the meeting TIME describes. Image: The White House (Molly Riley) / Wikimedia Commons, Public domain, cropped
Before he ordered US forces to seize Nicolás Maduro, Donald Trump asked an AI chatbot what would happen. TIME’s new cover story on the president, published on Thursday, reports that Trump put the question to Grok, the chatbot from Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI, during a private Oval Office meeting with Musk in December 2025.
What Trump asked, and what Grok said
According to an official who was in the room, Trump spent hours asking Grok about his presidency and his legacy. At the time he was ordering missile strikes on Venezuelan boats he said were smuggling drugs into the US, and he asked the chatbot how Venezuelans would react if the US captured Maduro.
Grok replied that Maduro was a repressive and deeply unpopular dictator, and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall, TIME reports. The following month, on January 3, 2026, US forces seized Maduro and his wife in Caracas and flew them to New York. Celebrations broke out in the streets, and Trump, according to officials, “came away thinking Grok was ingenious.”
TIME doesn’t say Grok shaped the decision, and its account rests on an unnamed official. We couldn’t find any public comment on it from the White House or SpaceXAI.
A president “in thrall” to the tech bosses
The Grok episode sits in a longer section on how Trump sees AI. TIME describes him as having “marveled at AI’s capabilities” and as “increasingly in thrall to the tech executives courting him”. It says he worries that AI enthusiasm is propping up the stock market and, after conversations with leaders such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, that China could gain a decisive lead if it builds more powerful AI first.
His own pollster’s surveys showed widespread anxiety about lost jobs, rising costs and AI escaping human control, according to TIME, but one aide said Trump “really just didn’t seem to care.” Asked in the interview about calls for new AI rules, Trump said:
I don’t have to destroy the industry. We’re making a lot of money with that industry. That industry is the Industrial Revolution, but bigger. It’s the internet, but much bigger.
Donald Trump, to TIME
We covered other parts of the same interview earlier on Thursday, including Trump saying he “might” take a stake in OpenAI and Anthropic.
Musk’s growing role
The report adds to a run of signs that Musk and his AI are close to the centre of government again. Grok is reported to be one of the chatbots behind America.gov, the government’s new AI front door, and on Wednesday the Pentagon named Musk a co-director of Project Meridian, its study of how future wars will be fought. Musk’s company also signed Trump’s voluntary AI accord on Tuesday.
Why it matters
This is almost certainly the first time a US president has been reported consulting a chatbot before a military operation, and it was a chatbot owned by one of his closest advisers. Grok gave an answer Trump wanted to hear, and that answer turned out to match what happened, which may make it more tempting to ask again.
Sources: TIME, “What Trump Has Built”; TIME interview transcript.
Latest SpaceXAI news
