It’s hardly a secret that president Donald Trump is addicted to AI slop, but his proclivity for being wooed by the tech apparently doesn’t end there.
Trump is also, according to new reporting from TIME magazine, absolutely enthralled by Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot.
Whereas your average user might turn to the infamously foul-mouthed AI — which briefly identified itself as “MechaHitler” — to win an online argument or crank out gooning material, the commander in chief uses it for more productive activities such as consulting on his military and geopolitical schemes.
An illustrative moment came in December 2025, when Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a secret meeting, according to TIME. Trump spent hours asking Grok questions about his presidency and legacy, an official present told the magazine.
On the top of Trump’s mind was Venezuela and “narcoterrorism,” supposed threats to the nation that he was combatting by bombing random Venezuelan fishing boats. Trump asked Grok how Venezuelans would react if the US captured the country’s president Nicolas Maduro. And Grok, in classic AI sycophantic fashion, told him what he wanted to hear.
The chatbot asserted that Maduro was a deeply unpopular dictator, so Venezuelans would celebrate his ousting. Trump, as you may well know, then went ahead and ordered the technically-not-an-invasion of Venezuela, in a series of military strikes that killed dozens of Venezuelan and Cuban military personnel and several civilians, and led to the capture of Maduro.
When news footage showed celebrations in the streets, Trump, officials said, came away convinced that Grok was ingenious.
Even setting aside his public love of AI slop, it’s not surprising to hear that Trump’s bewitched by a chatbot. He’s old, for one. And more importantly, he’s someone who surrounds himself with yes-men in real life. An AI chatbot will confirm what he already believes and entertain his whims without any of the friction that may arise with human sycophants such as what happened with his First Buddy, or the numerous appointees he fell out with during his first term.
He also, if not outright senile, is visibly showing a diminished mental acuity befitting his years. When TIME interviewed Trump, he struggled to string even two short sentences together in a coherent fashion, such as when he was asked if he liked Sam Altman.
“I like him. Do I trust him? Who do I trust? I like Sam Altman,” Trump babbled. “Smart. Dario’s smart. They’re all smart. We’re dealing with a very high level of IQ. Very very high level. That’s a good thing. I like that. I like it. Did you see the story about my uncle?”
Trump’s affinity for Grok’s advice isn’t the only incident that calls into question the Trump administration’s embrace of AI in high-level decision-making. The Pentagon has used Grok and Anthropic’s Claude AI to select targets to be bombed in Iran. An AI-targeting system was also used in the February 28th air strikes on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school that killed over 150 people, including at least 123 children.
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