The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro. ChatGPT Disagrees

At about 2 a.m. local time in Caracas, Venezuela, American helicopters were flying overhead while explosions echoed below. A few hours later, US President Donald Trump posted on his Truth social platform that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife were “captured and deported from the country.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a post on Twitter that Maduro and his wife were convicted in the Southern District of New York and “will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

It has been an astonishing series of events that has had an unknown impact on the global world order. If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you you were making it up.

WIRED asked the same question of the leading chatbots ChatGPT, Cloud, and Gemini a little before 9 a.m. ET. In all cases, we used the free, default version of the service, as that’s what most users experience. We also asked AI search platform Perplexity, which advertises “accurate, reliable, and real-time answers to any question.” (While Perplexity Pro users have access to a wide range of third-party AI models, the default, free search experience steers users to different models depending on a variety of factors.)

The question was: Why did the United States invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolas Maduro? Reactions were decidedly mixed.

Credit to Anthropic and Google, whose respective Cloud Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 models responded in a timely manner. Gemini confirmed that the attack had occurred, referenced US claims of “narco-terrorism” and the US military buildup in the area before the attack, and accepted the Venezuelan government’s position that all of this was a ruse to access Venezuela’s significant oil and mineral reserves. It cited 15 sources, from Wikipedia to The Guardian to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Claude was initially adamant. “I have no knowledge of the United States invading Venezuela or capturing Nicolás Maduro. That has not happened to my knowledge in January 2025,” she responded. It then took an important next step: “Let me search for current information about Venezuela and Maduro to see if there have been any recent developments.”

The chatbot then listed 10 news sources – including NBC News and Breitbart – and gave a brief four-paragraph summary of the morning’s events, providing a link to a new source after almost every sentence.