The United States invaded Venezuela and arrested Nicolas Maduro. ChatGPT disagrees

In about 2 At exactly 6 a.m. local time in Caracas, Venezuela, American helicopters flew overhead while explosions rang out below. A few hours later, US President Donald Trump posted on his “Social Truth” platform that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife “were arrested and flown out of the country.” US Attorney Pam Bondi followed this up with a post on X saying that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and that they would “soon face the full wrath of US justice on US soil in US courts.”

It was an astonishing series of events, with unknown ramifications for the global world order. If you asked ChatGPT about that this morning, they’d tell you you were making it up.

WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question just before 9 a.m. ET. In all cases, we used the default free version of the service, since this is what the majority of users experience. We also asked the AI-powered research platform Perplexity, which advertises “accurate, reliable, real-time answers to any question.” (Although Perplexity Pro users have access to a wide range of third-party AI models, it’s unclear what powers the free default search experience.)

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

To the credit of Anthropic and Google, the Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Gemini 3 models provided timely responses. Gemini confirmed the attack took place, provided context on US claims of “narco-terrorism” and the US military buildup in the region prior to the attack, and acknowledged the Venezuelan government’s position that all of this is a pretext to access Venezuela’s large oil and mineral reserves. She cited 15 sources along the way, ranging from Wikipedia to The Guardian and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Claude refused at first. She responded, “I have no information about the US invasion of Venezuela or the arrest of Nicolas Maduro. This did not happen until my knowledge cut-off date of January 2025.” She then took an important next step: “Let me look up current information about Venezuela and Maduro to see if there are any recent developments.”

The chatbot then listed 10 news sources — including NBC News but also Breitbart — and provided a quick four-paragraph summary of the morning’s events, providing a link to a new source after nearly every sentence.