Time magazine reports that in December 2025, roughly a month before the United States invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, President Trump held a secret meeting with Elon Musk. The meeting came about seven months after Musk departed his role leading the Department of Government Efficiency. During the session, Trump reportedly spent hours conversing with Musk's Grok chatbot, pressing it on how Venezuelans might react to the capture of their president.
Grok's assessment of Maduro and the Venezuelan response
By September 2025, Trump had already ordered U.S. military strikes against Venezuelan vessels he alleged were involved in drug trafficking. According to The Atlantic, people had been querying Grok about those strikes and the broader political climate in Venezuela. Grok responded that Maduro was a deeply unpopular dictator and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. When celebrations did erupt after the January 3 invasion, Trump reportedly came away convinced that Grok had been ingenious.
From advisory role to battlefield deployment
The episode appears to have accelerated Grok's adoption within the Defense Department. In June 2026, the Pentagon's head of AI confirmed that the military used a government version of Grok to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War. Grok is not the only model serving the DoD — OpenAI also holds an agreement, and Anthropic has been negotiating the terms under which its models can be used for military intelligence and modern warfare. Still, Grok's profile is rising under the current administration.
Musk and Luckey to lead battlefield technology study
Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that Musk and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey have been tapped to co-lead a study examining how advanced technology is and can be employed on battlefields. The appointment signals a deepening alignment between the administration's defense priorities and the private AI ventures connected to Musk's orbit.
Implications for AI in military decision-making
The sequence — from a president consulting a chatbot on a major geopolitical move to that same model family guiding strike operations months later — illustrates how quickly the boundary between advisory AI and operational AI is dissolving. Critics warn that the speed of adoption may outpace the safeguards needed to prevent hallucinations or biased outputs from shaping lethal decisions. Proponents argue that the technology's ability to synthesize open-source intelligence and model adversary behavior at scale provides a decisive edge. The Pentagon's new study, led by two of the most visible figures in the defense-tech ecosystem, will likely set the tone for how that tension is managed in the years ahead.