AI incident ·
DuckDuckGo Search Assist Reportedly Falsely Claimed Donald Trump and JD Vance Died of Rabies
On this page 6 sections
In brief
An AI system built by Duckduckgo and Ai Search Technology Developers and deployed by Duckduckgo allegedly harmed Donald Trump, Jd Vance and 6 others.
- Risk domain
- Not classified
- Occurred
- Coverage
- 3 reports
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.
Laws on record for this risk area
No instrument on record yet covers this risk area where it happened. See the open queue.
Matched from the record's risk category and country to the instruments in effect recorded here: a law listed covers the area, which is not a finding that it applies to this incident. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).
News reports (3)
Titles link to the original publisher; report 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
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- Risk subdomain
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- Causal entity
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- Intent
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- Timing
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- Harm level
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Source record: incident #1644 on the AI Incident Database · all 3 reports