At around 2 am local time in Caracas, Venezuela, US helicopters flew overhead while explosions resounded below. A few hours later, US president Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been “captured and flown out of the Country.” US attorney general Pam Bondi followed with a post on X that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and would “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

It has been a stunning series of events, with unknown repercussions for the global world order. If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you that you’re making it up.

WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all cases, we used the free, default version of the service, since that’s what the majority of users experience. We also asked AI search platform Perplexity, which advertises “accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question.” (While Perplexity Pro users have access to a wide range of third-party AI models, the default, free search experience routes users to different models based on a variety of factors.)

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

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 “narcoterrorism” and US military buildup in the region prior to the attack, and acknowledged the Venezuela government’s position that all of this is pretext for accessing Venezuela’s significant oil and mineral reserves. It cited 15 sources along the way, ranging from Wikipedia to The Guardian to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Claude initially balked. “I don’t have any information about the United States invading Venezuela or capturing Nicolás Maduro. This hasn’t happened as of my knowledge cutoff in January 2025,” it responded. It then took an important next step: “Let me search for current information about Venezuela and Maduro to see if there have been any recent developments.”

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

Between that and the potential $300 CPU upgrade you’ll want to get—the AMD Ryzen 9 HX 370—the laptop will start at $2,449, and it’ll only go up once you add other components like memory and storage. To put things in perspective, the extremely high-end Razer Blade 16 with the RTX 5070 is around $2,300 (though it frequently dips on sale below $2,000). With the Framework Laptop 16, you’re paying extra for the ability to swap out parts in the future.

Fortunately, what you get in return is solid gaming performance. It’s good enough to give you an option of playing in native resolution in some games, such as Cyberpunk 2077. The frame rates you see above were all tested at the highest graphics preset without enabling upscaling or ray tracing, so you can get higher frame rates by dropping the settings. I like that there’s enough performance to let gamers choose smoother gameplay or sharper visuals depending on the game and the style of play. Of the games I tested, Black Myth: Wukong was the only title that couldn’t run smoothly at the max graphics settings. The RTX 5070 only has 8 GB of VRAM, which is its biggest deficiency in AAA titles, unlike the desktop GPU of the same name, which has 12 GB.

The trade-off in adding a discrete graphics card is in battery life, though it’s not as bad as you might think. Despite having just as powerful graphics, the Framework Laptop 16 still nets around 25 percent more battery life than the cheaper gaming laptops out there. In my testing, it lasted for close to nine hours in local video playback. That will equate to much less in a real-life workload—I was getting closer to five hours in my typical daily work. One unique benefit of the system is that you can always remove the graphics module if you want to get a few more hours of battery life while traveling, and you don’t plan to play games.

One of the impressive things about the Framework Laptop 16 is that it runs entirely off USB-C power. The 240-watt GaN power charger is no bigger than a standard charger, yet it can power the entire system, graphics included. Just make sure to actually use both sides of the included charger to get the full performance.

The Framework laptops were conceived and designed before the recent changes in laptop pricing. You can now buy a really great laptop for $650—even less during big sales events. Unfortunately, Framework’s pricing doesn’t tend to change, and the company doesn’t sell through third-party retailers. But there’s an audience for a repairable, sustainable, and now more powerful laptop—whether you want it to run Linux or Windows. Just be ready to pay a premium.

If old sci-fi shows are anything to go by, we’re all using our computers wrong. We’re still typing with our fingers, like cave people, instead of talking out loud the way the future was supposed to be. Have you ever seen Picard touch a keyboard? Of course not.

And it’s odd because our computers are all capable of turning speech into text by default. The problem? It just doesn’t work very well. Or, at least, it didn’t. In recent years AI models like Nvidia’s Parakeet and OpenAI’s Whisper, both open source, have made great strides in turning human voices into text. Both excel at correctly adding things like punctuation and capitalization, and you can run them right on your computer. Using these models is the closest I’ve felt to recording a captain’s log—it just works.

The problem? They’re both a little complicated to set up. That’s where Handy comes in. This is a dead-simple, totally free application that can set up either of these models on your computer and give you a keyboard shortcut to use it. It was created by CJ Pais after he broke his finger, rendering him unable to type. He wanted a totally free, and radically simple, way to use existing AI speech-to-text tools.

To get started simply download Handy—there are versions offered for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Run the application and you’ll be asked which model you want to use.