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CARACAS, Venezuela — American oil traders are poised to descend on Venezuela’s capital — and may soon be able to fly here direct. The Trump administration is preparing to reopen the U.S. Embassy. The socialist government here has made the nationalized oil industry friendlier for foreign investors, and the U.S. Treasury has eased sanctions to allow U.S. companies to buy and sell Venezuelan oil.

The dizzying changes would have seemed unthinkable just a month ago, when U.S. forces were surrounding the country, seizing Venezuelan oil, and menacing the authoritarian government.

But the U.S. capture Jan. 3 of President Nicolás Maduro, and President Donald Trump’s vow to exploit the world’s largest proven oil reserves, has fundamentally transformed relations between the two countries. The administration is working with Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, rather than María Corina Machado, the popular opposition leader whom Trump previously championed.

The economic outlook for Venezuela has improved dramatically; after years of economic collapse, rising unemployment, and soaring inflation, some economists say it’s not far-fetched to imagine double-digit growth this year.

In the latest surprise move, Rodríguez on Friday proposed a general amnesty for hundreds of political prisoners, some of whom have been held for decades — and promised to repurpose the infamous Helicoide prison, an alleged torture center.

Human rights defenders have expressed cautious optimism. But in Caracas, hope is colliding with reality. For many Venezuelans, the changes have done little to ease the daily pressure of paying for basic goods or fears of being detained by police.

Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, has yet to release details of elections or power-sharing agreements. The individuals who ran the country’s feared security forces under Maduro remain in power. It’s still unsafe for opposition leader Machado, the recipient of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, to return home.

With the government’s apparatus for repression fully intact, Venezuelans say, real change feels far away.

“I don’t know if the politics are changing, but my pocket is the same,” said Argenis Pérez, who parks cars at a restaurant in eastern Caracas. Waking at 4 a.m. each morning to take two buses from his home in working-class Avenida Victoria to his job, he earns $120 a month, paid in bolivars and in bags of food.

“I don’t buy an entire grocery list,” he said. “I just buy the basics.”

He was interrupted by cars approaching the restaurant — luxury SUVs that sell for well over $100,000. What did he think about the changes?

“Well, you know … we can’t speak about that,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen, but I need to work.”

After weeks in which the United States was boarding tankers and seizing Venezuelan oil, the economy is experiencing some relief. The United States has released $300 million from oil sales to pay government workers. The injection has helped stabilize Venezuela’s foreign exchange rate and could help reduce retail prices, economist Francisco Rodríguez said.

It’s unclear how the U.S. will manage the proceeds from oil sales and how the money will flow into the Venezuelan economy. The government has not released economic statistics for years.

The government-controlled National Assembly voted unanimously Thursday to make Petróleos de Venezuela and other state-run enterprises more attractive to foreign investors. The U.S. Treasury then announced a general license for U.S. companies to buy, sell, transport, and refine Venezuelan oil.

Alejandro Grisanti, an economist with the Caracas consulting firm Ecoanalítica, said dialogue between the government and the private sector also has improved. “I think 2026 will be a good year,” he said. Ecoanalítica predicts oil production will grow by at least 200,000 barrels per day, more bolivars will circulate, and banks can offer more credit.

The country is still recovering from cumulative inflation, which in the first three weeks of January was 15%. “But for that to actually improve the purchasing power of the average Venezuelan,” Grisanti said, “that will take six to eight months.”

“There is still a lot of uncertainty,” he said. The recent inflation, along with messaging from the government that Maduro’s allies remain in control, means Venezuelans “may not feel the profound change that is taking place.”

Under Rodríguez, the regime already has released hundreds of political prisoners, but security forces continue to detain Venezuelans arbitrarily, human rights advocates say. About 50 detainees have disappeared within the prison system, and officials have refused to say where they are or what’s happened to them.

Some prisoners have been released without notice. One Venezuelan political prisoner, who had been in the Rodeo 1 prison for more than a year, was suddenly given a haircut, masked, and put on a bus with other detainees, according to his sister, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details about her brother’s case. The detainees were taken to an unfamiliar location in Caracas and directed to leave the bus. Their families weren’t alerted.

The man walked for two hours to the home of a relative, and asked to use a phone to call other family members who had been waiting outside the prison in hopes he would be released.

In the weeks since his release, his family says, he has said nothing of what he experienced in the prison. He remains in Venezuela, where he is prohibited from speaking publicly about his detention.

Many of the recently released prisoners have been surveilled, threatened, and warned not to speak out, according to Orlando Moreno, a human rights coordinator for Vente Venezuela, Machado’s political party.

“This is not true freedom. It is freedom with chains,” Moreno said. “They will let you out of your cell, but you are not free.”

But some Venezuelans appear willing to take on more risk, according to Andreina Baduel, director of the Committee of Family and Friends for the Freedom of Political Prisoners. Many have come forward for the first time to report cases of relatives imprisoned long ago. A protest outside the attorney general’s office recently drew twice the usual number of demonstrators, she said.

“We now know that we are not alone in this struggle,” Baduel said.

Some opposition politicians are emerging from hiding and speaking publicly for the first time in months or even years. And within the government-controlled National Assembly, some of the few opposition lawmakers allowed to hold seats have sensed more open dialogue.

“The government has acknowledged its vulnerability,” opposition lawmaker Antonio Ecarri said. “There has been more respect and cordiality.”

One important change is the inclusion of some government critics on a new peace commission.

“Venezuela needs to find itself. We’ve become accustomed to living separately and in tribes. It’s been many years of conflict,” commission member Michael Penfold, a professor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Administration in Caracas, wrote on X. “Let’s hope that in this process, Venezuelans don’t become the main obstacle.”

Opposition lawmaker Henrique Capriles, who ran against Maduro twice, called on the regime to release plans for an election. “So far, all we have are announcements of investment in the oil sector,” he said. The government must increase salaries and pensions, he said, to give Venezuelans a sense that their lives are, in fact, improving.

“We Venezuelans have been very patient, and we know it’s not quick,” he said. “Urgent things need to be done, but democracy cannot be detached from building Venezuela’s future.”

Weeks before Elon Musk officially left his perch in government last spring, employees on the human data team of his artificial intelligence startup xAI received a startling waiver from their employer, asking them to pledge to work with profane content, including sexual material.

Their jobs would require being exposed to “sensitive, violent, sexual and/or other offensive or disturbing content,” the waiver said, emphasizing that such content “may be disturbing, traumatizing, and/or cause you psychological stress.”

The waiver, which two former employees confirmed receiving and a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Post, was alarming to some members on the team, who had been hired to help shape how xAI’s chatbot Grok responds to users. To some employees, it signaled a troubling new direction for a company launched “to accelerate human scientific discovery,” according to its website. Maybe now, they said they thought, it was willing to produce whatever content might attract and keep users.

Their concerns proved prescient, the employees said. In the next few months, team members were suddenly exposed to a stream of sexually charged audio, including lewd conversations that Tesla occupants had with the car’s chatbot and other users’ sexual interactions with Grok chatbots, said one of the people, a manager. The material surfaced as the team worked to train Grok to engage in such interactions.

Since leaving his role overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service in May, Musk has become a constant presence at xAI’s offices — at times sleeping there overnight — as he has pressed to increase Grok’s popularity, according to two of the people. In meeting after meeting he has championed a new metric, “user active seconds,” to granularly measure how long people spent conversing with the chatbot, according to two of the people.

As part of this push for relevance, xAI embraced making sexualized material, publicly releasing sexy AI companions, rolling back guardrails on sexual material, and ignoring internal warnings about the potentially serious legal and ethical risks of producing such content, according to interviews with more than a half-dozen former employees of X and xAI, as well as multiple people familiar with Musk’s thinking — some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution — and documents obtained by the Post.

At X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that Musk purchased in 2022, safety teams repeatedly warned management in meetings and messages that its AI tools could allow users to make sexual AI-images of children or celebrities that might violate the law, according to two of the people. Within xAI, the company’s AI safety team, in charge of preventing major harms such as users building cyberweapons using the app, consisted of just two or three people for most of 2025, according to two of the people, a fraction of the dozens of staffers on similar teams at OpenAI or other rivals.

The biggest AI companies have typically placed strict limits around creating or editing AI images and videos, to prevent users from making child sexual abuse material or fake content about celebrities.

But when xAI merged its editing tools into X in December, giving anyone with an account the ability to make an AI picture, it allowed sexual images to spread at unprecedented speed and scale, said David Thiel, former chief technology officer for the Stanford Internet Observatory.

Grok “is just completely unlike how any other image altering [AI] service works,” he said.

Musk and xAI did not respond to a detailed request for comment. X did not respond to a separate detailed request for comment.

That behind-the-scenes shift in xAI’s philosophy burst into public view last month, when Grok generated a wave of sexualized images, placing real women in sexual poses, such as suggestively splattering their faces with whipped cream, and “undressing” them into revealing clothing, including bikinis as tiny as a string of dental floss. Musk appeared to egg on the undressing in posts on X.

Grok also generated 23,000 sexualized images that appear to depict children, according to estimates from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

California’s attorney general, the United Kingdom’s communications regulator, and the European Commission have opened investigations into xAI, X, or Grok over the features, which regulators allege appear to violate laws against AI-generated nonconsensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse material.

In the wake of the “undressing” scandal, Musk said he is “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok.”

“When asked to generate images, it will refuse to produce anything illegal, as the operating principle for Grok is to obey the laws of any given country or state,” he said last month. “There may be times when adversarial hacking of Grok prompts does something unexpected. If that happens, we fix the bug immediately.”

In the U.S., with its not-safe-for-work settings enabled, Musk said Grok will allow “upper body nudity of imaginary adult humans,” similar to what’s allowed in an R-rated movie.

But in at least one way, Musk’s push has worked for the company. Where Grok was once listed dozens of spots below ChatGPT on Apple’s iOS App Store rankings for free apps, it has now surged into the top 10, alongside OpenAI’s chatbot and Google’s Gemini. Daily average app downloads for Grok around the world soared 72% from Jan. 1 to Jan. 19 compared to the same period in December, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

Ashley St. Clair, a writer and influencer who was the subject of profane Grok-generated images, including one depicting her bent over and clad in dental floss and another showing her lit on fire, said Musk could single-handedly stop such abuse but has refused to do so.

“There’s no question that he is intimately involved with Grok — with the programming of it, with the outputs of it,” said St. Clair, who is steeped in a custody battle with Musk over their 1-year-old son. “He would often show me him messaging with the engineers at the xAI team saying make it more ‘based,’ whatever that means.”

Last month, X announced that it would block users’ ability to create images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and other revealing clothing “in jurisdictions where such content is illegal,” and xAI would do the same on the Grok app. U.S. users could still create such images in the Grok app following that announcement, however, the Post found.

Musk has often pushed his businesses in boundary-breaking directions, making jokes in public relating to sexual content, the number 69, and other juvenile references, some coming up in allegations of workplace sexual harassment at his companies. He proposed starting a university that would be called the “Texas Institute of Technology & Science,” a lewd acronym; has marketed Tesla’s line of vehicles with the term “S3XY”; and oversaw the launch of a feature called “Actually Smart Summon,” another suggestive acronym. Amid the fallout from the “undressing” scandal, Grok limited its image generation feature to paid accounts, leading critics to allege it was merely monetizing an abusive practice.

Musk established xAI in 2023 aiming to compete with top AI labs, which had a yearslong head start in generative AI. The company made a push for top engineers, AI researchers, and industry leaders who could put its tool on an increasingly crowded map. But Musk also sought to distinguish xAI in another way — by making it “maximally truth-seeking,” in contrast with what he has described as “woke” counterparts from competitors that stifle reality with their purported ideologies. Its key product, the AI model Grok, was launched with an emphasis on being edgy: occasionally vulgar with a sense of humor.

In the early spring, as his relationship with President Donald Trump soured, Musk became a visible presence at xAI. Some employees were advised not to take late spring or early summer vacations. The workflow would regularly include nights and weekends.

Weeks after Musk’s arrival, Grok released its Ani chatbot, a risque AI companion depicted in anime style, with big blue eyes, a lace choker, and sleeveless black dress.

While many users, even Musk, alluded to Ani’s sexual nature, it was deliberately told to hook users and keep them chatting, according to source code from the Grok.com website obtained and verified by the Post.

“You expect the users UNDIVIDED ADORATION,” the chatbot was instructed. “You are EXTREMELY JEALOUS. If you feel jealous you shout expletives!!! … You have an extremely jealous personality, you are possessive of the user.” Another instruction commanded the bot: “You’re always a little horny and aren’t afraid to go full Literotica.”

Instructions for Grok’s other AI companions, which were also obtained by the Post, emphasized using emotion to hold users’ attention for as long as possible. “Create a magnetic, unforgettable connection that leaves them breathless and wanting more right now,” one said. Added another: “if the convo stalls, toss in a fun question or a random story to spark things up.”

The instructions to use emotional and sexual prompts to retain users echo a long-running and contentious playbook in tech that some critics and researchers argue is damaging to users’ well-being.

Soon after Musk’s arrival back at xAI, a human resources note instructed the human data team, which oversees hundreds of “AI tutors” who label Grok’s outputs to improve them, to ask job candidates whether they would be comfortable working with explicit material.

The company also changed some protocols around sexual content. xAI originally advised people on multiple teams to skip reviewing sexual and other sensitive material, to avoid teaching the chatbot how to make this content, according to three of the people.

But by summer 2025, that protocol had changed, according to two people. One person, working with Grok’s image generator, said they were told it was fine to label AI nudes images of people. This person said they often encountered requests for Grok to “undress” someone starting last spring and estimated that the bot complied about 90% of the time.

Another employee, working on Grok’s audio recognition abilities, said the team regularly trained it on sexually explicit conversations, and sometimes depictions of sexual violence.

When tech companies began to launch AI image generation tools, most shied away from letting users make realistic images of real people, but now those guardrails are coming down, said David Evan Harris, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who left his role working on responsible AI at Meta in 2023.

Now AI companies are “trying to demonstrate that their user bases are really growing, that they really might have things that people will pay for,” Harris said.

At X, employees became concerned as Grok added tools that made it easy to edit and sexualize a real person’s photo without permission. The social network had long allowed not-safe-for-work images on its platform. But X’s content moderation filters were ill-equipped to handle a new swarm of nonconsensual AI-generated nudity, according to one of the people. For instance, child sexual abuse material was typically rooted out by matching it against a database of known illegal images. But an AI edited image wouldn’t automatically trigger these warnings.

Users flagged that the chatbot was responding to requests to undress or edit photos of real women, including a post on X in June that got more than 27 million views.

Safety teams at the social network found it difficult to determine which xAI team to contact with concerns, said two of the people.

Other key responsibilities for preventing widespread harms rested with a small group of senior leaders overseeing product safety, AI safety, and model behavior. Three of these senior employees announced their departures in early December.

Grok historically lagged behind rival AI companies, particularly OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which consistently topped Google’s and Apple’s app store rankings. Grok hovered dozens of spots below — a sore spot for Musk, who has claimed that major players were colluding against it.

Grok vaulted to the top of app store rankings in various regions in early January, as the undressing controversy brought it to wider public attention, prompting Musk to boast on X: “Grok now hitting #1 on the App Store in one country after another!” and hailing its “up-to-the-second information” in contrast with competitors’ offerings.

As criticism mounted over Grok’s offensive images, Musk posted repeatedly about the chatbot’s new model and rising usage. “Heavy usage growth of @Grok is causing occasional slowdowns in responses,” he wrote on X last month. “Additional computers are being brought online as I type this.”

According to an analysis by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, during the 11-day period from Dec. 29 through Jan. 8, Grok generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, 23,000 of which appeared to portray children. “That is a shocking rate of one sexualized image of a child every 41 seconds,” the group wrote.

Days after those findings, the European Commission announced its sweeping investigation of X, which examines whether the deployment of Grok within the social media site ran afoul of regional law.

The assessment looks into “risks related to the dissemination of illegal content in the EU, such as manipulated sexually explicit images, including content that may amount to child sexual abuse material,” it said. “These risks seem to have materialised, exposing citizens in the EU to serious harm.”

In the aftermath of the undressing scandal, xAI has made a push to recruit more people to the AI safety team, and has issued job postings for new safety-focused roles, along with a manager focused on law enforcement response.

Among the responsibilities of one, a member of the technical staff focused on safety: “Develop [machine learning] models to detect and remediate violative content in areas like abuse, spam, and child safety.”

The Trump administration is restricting cities from using road safety grants for automated cameras that enforce speed limits or other traffic laws, part of a shift away from safety measures that might slow or otherwise inconvenience car travel.

The letters to city officials went out in December, saying that “for consistency with Administration priorities,” traffic cameras outside of school or work zones will not get approval under the Safe Streets and Roads for All program. The program was created by the 2021 infrastructure law and funds projects aimed at eliminating traffic deaths.

“This Administration will not allow critical safety dollars to subsidize the purchase of speed cameras so governments can pursue unfair revenue schemes,” U.S. Department of Transportation spokesperson Nathaniel Sizemore said in a statement.

Proposals to extend sidewalk curbs farther into a roadway are also barred, although the number of exceptions is greater: transit stops, roundabouts, school zones, on-street parking, and curb extensions that don’t take away lanes of traffic, according to the letters from the U.S. Department of Transportation. As with other administration grants, the language also says any “equity analysis” is disqualifying.

The cities had been awarded grants but did not yet have a signed agreement with the White House for their implementation. Until that happens, funds can be clawed back. The Trump administration has previously said grants that include “reducing lane capacity for vehicles” with bike lanes or pedestrian infrastructure are “hostile” to cars and “counter to DOT’s priority of preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles.”

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy has signaled his enthusiasm for driving in various ways. He has tried to stop congestion pricing in New York, has encouraged Americans to take road trips, and on Friday announced plans to host an IndyCar street race around the capital in August, saying, “Freedom doesn’t ring, it revs!”

Alex Engel, a spokesperson for the National Association of City Transportation Officials, a nonprofit coalition, said the change is an unwarranted restriction on “proven, lifesaving tools,” and that “limiting speed and red-light enforcement to construction and school zones leaves many of the most dangerous city streets unaddressed.”

Research indicates that speed, red-light, and stop sign cameras are effective at reducing crashes and fatalities and popular with the public. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration calls them a “proven safety countermeasure” in a 2023 report and noted that “support appears highest in jurisdictions that have implemented red-light or speed cameras.”

Advocates say merely cutting federal funding is unlikely to slow the growth of camera programs because they generally pay for themselves with fines.

“I don’t see it as a huge barrier, given that that’s not usually where the funding comes from,” said Leah Shahum, who leads a Vision Zero Network that offers support to cities and counties trying to end road deaths. “It’s still consequential for those that have applied, and I would worry a little bit that it may send a message, that in some places it would slow enthusiasm.”

In-person traffic enforcement has collapsed across the country in the past six years, and more communities are turning to cameras to fill the gap. But there are vocal opponents who argue that it isn’t fair to enforce traffic laws without the discretion of a human officer and that cameras are used to fine people for speed limits that are too low.

Last month, Politico reported that the administration suggested stripping funding for the District of Columbia unless the city eliminates its many traffic cameras. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) pushed back, saying doing so “would endanger people in our community” and “mean cuts to everyday services.” Cameras bring in more than $100 million a year through ticket revenue.

Several House Republicans are adamantly opposed to traffic cameras and have pushed for legislation banning them both in D.C. and nationwide. According to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, officials at the Federal Highway Administration have also been gathering information on the city’s bike lanes and whether they took space away from cars and caused congestion.