Trump consulted Musk's AI on what the consequences of attacking Venezuela would be weeks before the operation

BarcelonaLast December, Donald Trump and Elon Musk met at the White House. It was yet another meeting between the American president and the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, but in this case, there was a bizarre moment. During the time they shared, Trump asked the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, developed by Musk's team, how Venezuelans would react to an eventual capture of their president, Nicolás Maduro. A few weeks later, on January 3rd, the United States launched an attack in which they kidnapped the Venezuelan leader.

As revealed by Time magazine, Trump spent hours asking Grok questions about various issues related to his presidency and his legacy. Amidst the American military campaign against vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific that Washington, without evidence, linked to drug trafficking —and which still continues a year later—, the American president asked specifically about the social consequences of a possible capture of Maduro.

Grok responded that Maduro was a "deeply unpopular dictator" and that many Venezuelans would likely celebrate his downfall. The information published by the magazine does not clarify whether or not the chatbot directly recommended capturing the president of Venezuela. According to the source cited by Time, when part of the Venezuelan population celebrated the operation after Maduro's extraction, Trump was impressed by Grok's ability to foresee it.

Suspicions towards Trump

The revelation comes at a time when some of the sectors that initially viewed Washington's intervention favorably are beginning to distrust and even reject the White House's subsequent actions in the country. The hope for change that some Venezuelans projected onto Trump's operation is fading as the months go by. Far from favoring the calling of elections, the American president has propped up Chavismo in power by striking various agreements with the heirs of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro to plunder Venezuela's natural resources.

Among the most relevant agreements, the latest is the pact forced by the White House with the Miraflores Palace at the end of August, through which the United States ensures it will control nearly a quarter of Venezuela's oil reserves. The Pentagon has acquired 35% of the shares of North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the company to which the concession was awarded without a bidding process, and which is owned by a Venezuelan businessman under investigation in Spain and Switzerland for money laundering. In this way, Washington secures oil at cost price at a time of tension in the global crude market, with the Strait of Hormuz still almost paralyzed and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, in the Red Sea, threatened by the Houthis of Yemen.