Trump’s secret meeting with Musk in the Oval Office: the president “spent hours” talking with the Grok chatbot about Venezuela

A month before the United States invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, Donald Trump had a secret meeting with Elon Musk in the Oval Office, as TechCrunch reports, citing a new cover story by TIME magazine.

The meeting took place about seven months after Musk left his role in the Trump administration at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). During it, Trump “spent hours” talking with Musk’s Grok chatbot, asking it how Venezuelans would react to the capture of their president, a source told TIME.

Just a few months earlier, in September, Trump had begun ordering U.S. military strikes against Venezuelan boats he claimed were engaged in drug trafficking. People had turned to Grok with questions about the boat strikes and the political climate in Venezuela, as The Atlantic had reported at the time. Grok told Trump that Maduro was a “deeply unpopular dictator” and that “many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his fall,” TIME reports.

When such celebrations did indeed occur after the January 3 invasion, Trump “walked away with the idea that Grok was a genius,” according to the source. However, TIME does not say that Grok shaped his decision: the magazine’s account rests on an unnamed official who was in the room, and no public comment was found from the White House or SpaceXAI.

In the background is also the ever greater use of artificial intelligence in the military field: in June of this year, the Pentagon’s AI chief said the military had used Gov Grok for deploying and striking targets during the Iran War. OpenAI also has an agreement with the Department of Defense, while Anthropic has been in discussions over the use of its models for military intelligence. Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey have been appointed to co-lead a study on the use of advanced technology on battlefields.