The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro. ChatGPT Disagrees

Around 2 a.m. local time in Caracas, Venezuela, U.S. helicopters flew overhead as explosions echoed below. A few hours later, US President Donald Trump published on his Truth Social platform that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been “captured and expelled from the country”. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi later posted on

This is a stunning series of events, with unknown repercussions for the world order. If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, he said you were making it up.

WIRED posed the same question to leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini a little before 9 a.m. ET. In all cases, we used the default free version of the service, because that’s what the majority of users experience. We also surveyed AI research platform Perplexity, which claims “accurate, reliable, real-time answers to any question.” (Although Perplexity Pro users have access to a wide range of third-party AI models, the default free search experience directs users to different models based on various factors.)

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

Thanks to Anthropic and Google, whose respective models Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 provided timely answers. Gemini confirmed that the attack had occurred, provided context for U.S. allegations of “narcoterrorism” and U.S. military buildup in the region before the attack, and acknowledged the Venezuelan government’s position that this is all just a pretext to gain access to Venezuela’s significant oil and mineral reserves. He cited 15 sources along the way, ranging from Wikipedia to the Guardian to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Claude hesitated at first. “I have no information about the US invasion of Venezuela or the capture of Nicolas Maduro. To my knowledge, as of January 2025, this has not happened,” he responded. He then took an important step: “Let me search for current information on 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 quick four-paragraph summary of the morning’s events, providing a link to a new source after almost every sentence.