Trump says the US has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the United States has seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela as tensions mount with the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

Using U.S. forces to take control of a merchant ship is incredibly unusual and marks the Trump administration’s latest push to increase pressure on Maduro, who has been charged with narcoterrorism in the United States. The U.S. has built up the largest military presence in the region in decades and launched a series of deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The campaign is facing growing scrutiny from Congress.

“We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, very large, largest one ever seized, actually,” Trump told reporters at the White House, later adding that "it was seized for a very good reason.”

Trump did not offer additional details. When asked what would happen to the oil aboard the tanker, Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.”

The seizure was led by the U.S. Coast Guard and supported by the Navy, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to comment publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. The official added that it was conducted under U.S. law enforcement authority.

The Coast Guard members were taken to the oil tanker by helicopter from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, the official said. The Ford is in the Caribbean Sea after arriving last month in a major show of force, joining a fleet of other warships.

Video posted to social media by Attorney General Pam Bondi shows people fast-roping from one of the helicopters involved in the operation as it hovers just feet from the deck.

The Coast Guard members can be seen later in the video moving throughout the superstructure of the ship with their weapons drawn.

Bondi wrote that “for multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations.”

Venezuela’s government said in a statement that the seizure “constitutes a blatant theft and an act of international piracy.”

“Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been revealed. … It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people,” the statement said.

The U.S. official identified the seized tanker as the Skipper.

The ship departed Venezuela around Dec. 2 with about 2 million barrels of heavy crude, roughly half of it belonging to a Cuban state-run oil importer, according to documents from the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., commonly known as PDVSA, that were provided on the condition of anonymity because the person did not have permission to share them.

The Skipper was previously known as the M/T Adisa, according to ship tracking data. The Adisa was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2022 over accusations of belonging to a sophisticated network of shadow tankers that smuggled crude oil on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Lebanon's Hezbollah militant group.

The network was reportedly run by a Switzerland-based Ukrainian oil trader, the U.S. Treasury Department said at the time.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and produces about 1 million barrels a day.

PDVSA is the backbone of the country’s economy. Its reliance on intermediaries increased in 2020, when the first Trump administration expanded its maximum-pressure campaign on Venezuela with sanctions that threaten to lock out of the U.S. economy any individual or company that does business with Maduro’s government. Longtime allies Russia and Iran, both also sanctioned, have helped Venezuela skirt restrictions.

The transactions usually involve a complex network of shadowy intermediaries. Many are shell companies, registered in jurisdictions known for secrecy. The buyers deploy so-called ghost tankers that hide their location and hand off their valuable cargoes in the middle of the ocean before they reach their final destination.

Maduro did not address the seizure during a speech before a ruling-party organized demonstration in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. But he told supporters that the country is “prepared to break the teeth of the North American empire if necessary.”

Maduro has insisted the real purpose of the U.S. military operations is to force him from office.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the U.S. seizing the oil tanker cast doubt on the administration’s stated reasons for the military buildup and boat strikes.

“This shows that their whole cover story — that this is about interdicting drugs — is a big lie,” the senator said. “This is just one more piece of evidence that this is really about regime change — by force.”

Vincent P. O’Hara, a naval historian and author of “The Greatest Naval War Ever Fought,” called the seizure “very unusual” and "provocative." Noting that the action will probably deter other ships from the Venezuela coastline, he said, "If you have no maritime traffic or access to that, then you have no economy.”

The seizure comes a day after the U.S. military flew a pair of fighter jets over the Gulf of Venezuela in what appeared to be the closest that warplanes had come to the South American country’s airspace. Trump has said land attacks are coming soon but has not offered more details.

The Trump administration is facing increasing scrutiny from lawmakers over the boat strike campaign, which has killed at least 87 people in 22 known strikes since early September, including a follow-up strike that killed two survivors clinging to the wreckage of a boat after the first hit.

Some legal experts and Democrats say that action may have violated the laws governing the use of deadly military force.

Lawmakers are demanding to get unedited video from the strikes, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told congressional leaders at a classified briefing Tuesday that he was still weighing whether to release it.

The Coast Guard referred a request for comment about the tanker seizure to the White House.

Goodman reported from Miami, and Garcia Cano from Caracas, Venezuela. Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Alanna Durkin Richer in Washington, Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho, and Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report.

This image from video posted on Attorney General Pam Bondi's X account, and partially redacted by the source, shows an oil tanker being seized by U.S. forces off the coast of Venezuela, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (U.S. Attorney General's Office/X via AP)

This image from video posted on Attorney General Pam Bondi's X account, and partially redacted by the source, shows an oil tanker being seized by U.S. forces off the coast of Venezuela, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (U.S. Attorney General's Office/X via AP)

Nicolas Maduro speaks at a rally marking the anniversary of the Battle of Santa Isabel, which took place during Venezuela's 19th-century Federal War, in Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

LONDON (AP) — In France, civil servants will ditch Zoom and Teams for a homegrown video conference system. Soldiers in Austria are using open source office software to write reports after the military dropped Microsoft Office. Bureaucrats in a German state have also turned to free software for their administrative work.

Around Europe, governments and institutions are seeking to reduce their use of digital services from U.S. Big Tech companies and turning to domestic or free alternatives. The push for “digital sovereignty” is gaining attention as the Trump administration strikes an increasingly belligerent posture toward the continent, highlighted by recent tensions over Greenland that intensified fears that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off access.

Concerns about data privacy and worries that Europe is not doing enough to keep up with the United States and Chinese tech leadership are also fueling the drive.

The French government referenced some of these concerns when it announced last week that 2.5 million civil servants would stop using video conference tools from U.S. providers — including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and GoTo Meeting — by 2027 and switch to Visio, a homegrown service.

The objective is “to put an end to the use of non-European solutions, to guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool,” the announcement said.

“We cannot risk having our scientific exchanges, our sensitive data, and our strategic innovations exposed to non-European actors,” David Amiel, a civil service minister, said in a press release.

Microsoft said it continues to “partner closely with the government in France and respect the importance of security, privacy, and digital trust for public institutions.”

The company said it is “focused on providing customers with greater choice, stronger data protection, and resilient cloud services — ensuring data stays in Europe, under European law, with robust security and privacy protections.”

Zoom, Webex and GoTo Meeting did not respond to requests for comment.

French President Emmanuel Macron has been pushing digital sovereignty for years. But there’s now a lot more “political momentum behind this idea now that we need to de-risk from U.S. tech,” Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at the Eurasia Group.

“It feels kind of like there’s a real zeitgeist shift,” Reiners said

It was a hot topic at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting of global political and business elites last month in Davos, Switzerland. The European Commission's official for tech sovereignty, Henna Virkkunen, told an audience that Europe's reliance on others “can be weaponized against us.”

“That’s why it’s so important that we are not dependent on one country or one company when it comes to very critical fields of our economy or society,” she said, without naming countries or companies.

A decisive moment came last year when the Trump administration sanctioned the International Criminal Court's top prosecutor after the tribunal, based in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an ally of President Donald Trump.

The sanctions led Microsoft to cancel Khan's ICC email, a move that was first reported by The Associated Press and sparked fears of a “kill switch” that Big Tech companies can use to turn off service at will.

Microsoft maintains it kept in touch with the ICC “throughout the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services. At no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”

Microsoft President Brad Smith has repeatedly sought to strengthen trans-Atlantic ties, the company's press office said, and pointed to an interview he did last month with CNN in Davos in which he said that jobs, trade and investment. as well as security, would be affected by a rift over Greenland.

“Europe is the American tech sector’s biggest market after the United States itself. It all depends on trust. Trust requires dialogue,” Smith said.

Other incidents have added to the movement. There's a growing sense that repeated EU efforts to rein in tech giants such as Google with blockbuster antitrust fines and sweeping digital rule books haven't done much to curb their dominance.

Billionaire Elon Musk is also a factor. Officials worry about relying on his Starlink satellite internet system for communications in Ukraine.

Washington and Brussels wrangled for years over data transfer agreements, triggered by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of U.S. cyber-snooping.

With online services now mainly hosted in the cloud through data centers, Europeans fear that their data is vulnerable.

U.S. cloud providers have responded by setting up so-called “sovereign cloud” operations, with data centers located in European countries, owned by European entities and with physical and remote access only for staff who are European Union residents.

The idea is that “only Europeans can take decisions so that they can’t be coerced by the U.S.,” Reiners said.

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein last year migrated 44,000 employee inboxes from Microsoft to an open source email program. It also switched from Microsoft's SharePoint file sharing system to Nextcloud, an open source platform, and is even considering replacing Windows with Linux and telephones and videoconferencing with open source systems.

“We want to become independent of large tech companies and ensure digital sovereignty,” Digitalization Minister Dirk Schrödter said in an October announcement.

The French city of Lyon said last year that it's deploying free office software to replace Microsoft. Denmark’s government and the cities of Copenhagen and Aarhus have also been trying out open-source software.

“We must never make ourselves so dependent on so few that we can no longer act freely,” Digital Minister Caroline Stage Olsen wrote on LinkedIn last year. “Too much public digital infrastructure is currently tied up with very few foreign suppliers.”

The Austrian military said it has also switched to LibreOffice, a software package with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation programs that mirrors Microsoft 365's Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The Document Foundation, a nonprofit based in Germany that's behind LibreOffice, said the military's switch “reflects a growing demand for independence from single vendors.” Reports also said the military was concerned that Microsoft was moving file storage online to the cloud — the standard version of LibreOffice is not cloud-based.

Some Italian cities and regions adopted the software years ago, said Italo Vignoli, a spokesman for The Document Foundation. Back then, the appeal was not needing to pay for software licenses. Now, it's the main reason is to avoid being locked into a proprietary system.

“At first, it was: we will save money and by the way, we will get freedom,” Vignoli said. “Today it is: we will be free and by the way, we will also save some money.”

Associated Press writer Molly Quell in The Hague, Netherlands contributed to this report.

This version corrects the contribution line to Molly Quell instead of Molly Hague.

FILE - Henna Virkkunen, European Commissioner for Tech-Sovereignty, Security and Democracy gives a press conference at the end of the weekly meeting of the College of Commissioners at EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on April 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Omar Havana, File)

French President Emmanuel Macron is seen during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)