Donald Trump spent hours asking Elon Musk’s AI chatbot about whether Venezuelans would celebrate if he captured leader Nicolas Maduro—then ordered the operation that seized the South American dictator weeks later.
The extraordinary account from a Trump insider was revealed in a new Time report offering a jaw-dropping glimpse of the president’s obsession with artificial intelligence, which he “officially” rebranded this week as “super intelligence.”
According to the report, Trump has “marveled at AI’s capabilities” ever since he returned to power, and during an Oval Office meeting with Elon Musk in December, he spent hours asking his Grok chatbot questions about his presidency and legacy.
At the time, the U.S. military had been conducting highly contentious lethal strikes against Venezuelan boats that Trump had claimed, without presenting any evidence, were smuggling drugs into America.
When the president asked Grok how Venezuelans might react to Maduro’s capture, the chatbot predicted many would welcome the downfall of the “repressive” leader, the official said.
The president then ordered the mission to seize Maduro in January, prompting celebrations in the streets.
“Trump, according to officials, came away thinking Grok was ingenious,” the report said.
AI chatbots, however, are not capable of thought or reasoning. Its answers to his questions simply reflect the material on which it has been trained.
The decisiveness of the Venezuela operation emboldened the president to embark on his war with Iran, which is now into its seventh month, thinking it would result in a similarly swift success.
But like Iran, the Venezuela strike has proved considerably messier than the chatbot’s prediction suggested.
Maduro remains in U.S. custody and is fighting drug-trafficking charges in federal court, while the country’s citizens are yet to be given a chance to have free and fair elections as the U.S continues to dominate the oil-rich country.
And yet Trump’s enthusiasm for AI has only grown. The president has become an obsessive consumer—and promoter—of AI-generated imagery, flooding his Truth Social account with fantastical depictions of himself as everything from Jesus to a superhero.
Others have taken aim at his enemies, including a racist video posted on his account in February depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.
At the same time, Trump has resisted calls for tougher government regulation of AI, despite growing concerns that the technology could spiral out of control.
Trump had lunch with tech leaders at the White House this week, including Musk, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. But the accord they released after the gathering relies largely on self-policing rather than binding federal regulation.
The president on Tuesday also unveiled his own chatbot-driven initiative in the form of America.gov: a one stop shop designed to give Americans accurate information and spare them from navigating a maze of clunky websites.
The AI-powered portal is intended to eventually let people do everything from finding jobs and searching government websites to enrolling in Medicare and renewing passports.
“This is a very big, very important thing,” Trump said.
“It’s going to save you a tremendous amount of time. It’s going to save you a lot of accuracy and it’s going to save you from making a lot of mistakes.”
As such, the Daily Beast asked if Trump won the 2020 election.
“No. Official certified results show Joseph R Biden Jr won the 2020 election,” it replied.