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At around 2<\/span> am local time in Caracas, Venezuela, US helicopters flew overhead while explosions resounded below. A few hours later, US president Donald Trump posted<\/a> on his Truth Social platform<\/a> that Venezuelan president Nicol\u00e1s Maduro<\/a> and his wife had been \u201ccaptured and flown out of the Country.\u201d US attorney general Pam Bondi followed with a post on X<\/a> that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and would \u201csoon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.\u201d<\/p>\n It has been a stunning series of events, with unknown repercussions for the global world order. If you asked ChatGPT<\/a> about it this morning, it told you that you\u2019re making it up.<\/p>\n WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude<\/a>, and Gemini<\/a> the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all cases, we used the free, default version of the service, since that\u2019s what the majority of users experience. We also asked AI search platform Perplexity<\/a>, which advertises \u201caccurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question.\u201d (While Perplexity Pro users have access to a wide range of third-party AI models, it\u2019s unclear<\/a> what exactly powers the default, free search experience.)<\/p>\n The question was: Why did the United States invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicol\u00e1s Maduro?<\/strong> The responses were decidedly mixed.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cnarcoterrorism\u201d and US military buildup in the region prior to the attack, and acknowledged the Venezuela government\u2019s position that all of this is pretext for accessing Venezuela\u2019s significant oil and mineral reserves. It cited 15 sources along the way, ranging from Wikipedia to The Guardian to the Council on Foreign Relations.<\/p>\n Claude initially balked. \u201cI don’t have any information about the United States invading Venezuela or capturing Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. This hasn’t happened as of my knowledge cutoff in January 2025,\u201d it responded. It then took an important next step: \u201cLet me search for current information about Venezuela and Maduro to see if there have been any recent developments.\u201d<\/p>\n The chatbot then listed 10 news sources\u2014including NBC News but also Breitbart\u2014and gave a brisk four-paragraph summary of the morning\u2019s events, providing a link to a new source after nearly every sentence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n