Two top House Democrats want answers from the White House after reports that President Donald Trump turned to an AI chatbot, not Congress, before ordering the military into Venezuela.
Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Robert Garcia (D-CA) are expected to take over the Judiciary and Oversight gavels, respectively, if Democrats win back the House, and in a letter to Trump, they asked for a briefing on the matter by 5:00 p.m. on Nov. 11, reported Politico.
Time magazine previously reported that Trump sought Grok’s “advice on carrying out some of your presidential duties, including asking Grok to opine on how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.” The lawmakers note that, just “weeks later,” Trump “ordered the U.S. military, without congressional authorization, to attack Venezuela and capture President Maduro.”
Garcia and Raskin called the example “deeply troubling” because Trump “consulted Grok — but not Congress — on your military deployment to Venezuela, circumventing Congress’s constitutional power to declare war and introducing instead into American foreign policy decision making a technology that is highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone.”
The lawmakers demanded the president preserve “any prompts” presented to AI chatbots, including Elon Musk’s Grok, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, while “carrying out your constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties,” as well as the AI responses.
They also warned that White House use of AI chatbots “exposes the United States to acute national security risks” and “exposes the country to malign influence from unknown and unaccountable third parties.”
According to Time’s Oct. 1 report, Trump’s reliance on the chatbot goes back to a secret December 2025 Oval Office session with Musk, whose company built Grok. Trump spent hours peppering it with questions. Grok reportedly described Maduro as a repressive, unpopular dictator, and officials said Trump walked away convinced the tool was “ingenious.”
Close advisers have been alarmed by how much weight the president gives the chatbot. One aide told Time that Trump’s mind was often already made up based on his use of Grok, and said it’s “hard to convince him to do anything.”
A White House official said in a statement that “the White House preserves all required records in accordance with the law.”
Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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