AI incident #1644 ·
DuckDuckGo Search Assist Reportedly Falsely Claimed Donald Trump and JD Vance Died of Rabies
What happened
DuckDuckGo's Search Assist reportedly produced an answer stating that Donald Trump and JD Vance had died of rabies and repeated fabricated details involving Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The answer cited a false WKNA49 article alongside an unrelated ABC News report. Reporting linked the episode to adversarial web content associated with r/poisonai. DuckDuckGo said Search Assist had been "deliberately tricked," fixed the result, and planned updates.
Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.
News reports (3)
Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.
Who was involved
- Alleged deployer
- Duckduckgo
- Alleged developer
- Duckduckgo, Ai Search Technology Developers
- Alleged harmed party
- Donald Trump, Jd Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elected Officials, General Public, Epistemic Integrity, General Public Of The United States, Public Figures
Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)
- Risk domain
- —
- Risk subdomain
- —
- Causal entity
- —
- Intent
- —
- Timing
- —
- Harm level
- —
- Sectors
- —
- Countries
- —