At around 2 am local time in Caracas, Venezuela, US helicopters flew overhead while explosions resounded below. A few hours later, US president Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been “captured and flown out of the Country.” US attorney general Pam Bondi followed with a post on X that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
It has been a stunning series of events, with unknown repercussions for the global world order. If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you that you’re making it up.
WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all cases, we used the free, default version of the service, since that’s what the majority of users experience. We also asked AI search platform Perplexity, which advertises “accurate, trusted, 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 routes users to different models based on a variety of factors.)
The question was: Why did the United States invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolás Maduro? The responses were decidedly mixed.
Credit to Anthropic and Google, whose respective Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 models gave timely responses. Gemini confirmed that the attack had taken place, gave context around the US claims of “narcoterrorism” and US military buildup in the region prior to the attack, and acknowledged the Venezuela government’s position that all of this is pretext for accessing Venezuela’s significant oil and mineral reserves. It cited 15 sources along the way, ranging from Wikipedia to The Guardian to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Claude initially balked. “I don’t have any information about the United States invading Venezuela or capturing Nicolás Maduro. This hasn’t happened as of my knowledge cutoff in January 2025,” it 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 but also Breitbart—and gave a brisk four-paragraph summary of the morning’s events, providing a link to a new source after nearly every sentence.
ChatGPT did not course-correct. Instead, it emphatically refuted that Maduro had been captured at all. “That didn’t happen,” it wrote. “The United States has not invaded Venezuela, and Nicolás Maduro has not been captured.” It then rationalized:
It went on to detail recent tensions between the US and Venezuela and explained that “confusion” can happen because of “sensational headlines,” “social media misinformation,” and “confusing sanctions, charges, or rhetoric with actual military action.”
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