Several images said to show the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro have been widely circulated on social media. They are, in fact, fake and were generated by artificial intelligence. It shows how AI is contributing to the spread of disinformation, especially as AI depictions become more realistic.

Issued on: 06/01/2026 - 19:18Modified: 06/01/2026 - 19:34

On the night of Friday, January 2, the US carried out a special forces raid and captured the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. They were then transported to the US.

As soon as the news broke, a number of images said to show the capture of the Venezuelan leader were widely shared on social media. However, these images were fake: they were generated by AI.

An anomaly in the image of Maduro on the tarmac

A series of photos posted on January 3 – some taken face-on, others from above – were described as the first images to show the Venezuelan president after his capture by the US Army. According to one X user, they show Maduro being escorted across the tarmac by two US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents before being loaded onto a US-bound plane.

The image of Maduro was even shared by several news sites (examples here and here) to illustrate articles about his capture. The image was also retweeted by the White House’s official X account.

At first glance, these images seem pretty realistic. They show the Venezuelan leader being escorted by DEA agents from a few different angles. Maduro is wearing the same black suit, and the agents are wearing identical uniforms in all the images.

However, these photos are fake and were created by Google’s AI image generator, Nano Banana Pro, which is able to create realistic images.

These images are stamped with a watermark, which proves that they were AI-generated. This is a precaution put in place by Google so that artificially-generated content can be identified. This watermark is invisible to the naked eye, but it is visible to SynthID, a verification tool integrated into Google Lens. If you upload these images into Google Lens, it then reads, "Created with Google’s AI” in the “About this image” section.

The photo also features a defect that gives away the fact that it was AI-generated. There is an anomaly in Maduro’s jacket: a giant, blurred mark on the right leaves a gaping hole in his jacket. AI sometimes struggles to reproduce specific details.

Finally, @ultravfx, the name that appears on the watermark that is visible on the image, is an artist who creates AI-generated images.

A photo of the Venezuelan president wearing the wrong pyjamas?

Another image of the capture posted online on January 3 has so far garnered more than 4 million views on X. The image appears to show the Venezuelan president in an embarrassing situation: in custody and en route to the United States in his pyjamas.

This image also looks realistic: there are no flagrant anomalies, but its poor resolution means that it is hard to discern the details. However, there are a few clues that this image, too, was AI-generated.

First of all, the soldier sitting to the right of the Venezuelan president isn’t wearing the regulation camouflage print used by the US military. It actually seems to be a reproduction of the "Universal Camouflage Pattern" (UCP), a pattern that hasn’t been used by the US Army since 2019. The US Army actually currently uses a pattern called the "Operational Camouflage Pattern". The OCP is made up of green and brown patches, unlike the UCP, which features grey and black patches.

Maduro is wearing white pyjamas in the image shared online. US President Donald Trump posted an image on January 3 on the social media network Truth Social that features the Venezuelan president on board the USS Iwo Jima en route to the United States, wearing not white pyjamas but what appears to be a grey tracksuit. It is important to note that we can’t guarantee the authenticity of this image shared by Trump, as underlined in an article published in the New York Times.

A photo of incarcerated Maduro generated by Nano Banana

Another image, posted on January 4 on X, where it garnered more than 800,000 views, shows Maduro apparently incarcerated in a US prison. You can see the Venezuelan leader in chains, wearing the classic orange prison jumpsuit.

SynthID, Google’s AI verification tool, shows that this image was created by Nano Banana, just like the images said to show Maduro on the tarmac.

Images published by the media of Maduro’s arrival in New York, or during his first appearance in court on January 5, show the president wearing black or brown, not an orange prisoner's uniform.

This article has been translated from the original in French by Brenna Daldorph.

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