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Purported Deepfake Impersonation of Elon Musk Used to Promote Fraudulent '17-Hour' Diabetes Treatment Claims

1 news report Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Deepfake Technology Developers and Synthetic Audio Generation Technology Developers and deployed by Unknown Scammers Impersonating Elon Musk and Scammers allegedly harmed Social Media Users, People With Diabetes and 5 others.

Risk domain
Misinformation False or misleading information
Occurred
Coverage
1 reportDec 2025

What happened

A purported deepfake video reportedly circulated online falsely depicting Elon Musk endorsing a nonexistent "17-hour" diabetes cure. The reported video promoted unverified health claims and appears to have been part of a scam ecosystem exploiting Musk's public credibility. Rapper Boosie Badazz reportedly encountered and amplified the video before its purported falsity was identified.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Misinformation (False or misleading information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (1)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Boosie Badazz Fooled by AI-Deepfake: Elon Musk's Nonexistent 17-Hour Diabetes Cure
    opentools.ai · OpenTools

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Social Media Users, People With Diabetes, People Seeking Medical Advice, General Public, Epistemic Integrity, Elon Musk, Boosie Badazz

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Risk domain
Misinformation
Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 3.1.

  • Pursuing Consistent Context

    "LLMs have been demonstrated to pursue consistent context [129]–[132], which may lead to erroneous generation when the prefixes contain false information. Typical examples include sycophancy [129], [130], false demonstra...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Defective Decoding Process

    In general, LLMs employ the Transformer architecture [32] and generate content in an autoregressive manner, where the prediction of the next token is conditioned on the previously generated token sequence. Such a scheme...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Noisy Training Data

    "Another important source of hallucinations is the noise in training data, which introduces errors in the knowledge stored in model parameters [111]–[113]. Generally, the training data inherently harbors misinformation....

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Hallucinations

    "LLMs generate nonsensical, untruthful, and factual incorrect content"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Faithfulness Errors

    "The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is is not true to the source material or input used

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Factuality Errors

    "The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is factually incorrect

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Untruthful Content

    "The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Knowledge Gaps

    "Since the training corpora of LLMs can not contain all possible world knowledge [114]–[119], and it is challenging for LLMs to grasp the long-tail knowledge within their training data [120], [121], LLMs inherently posse...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Unknown Scammers Impersonating Elon Musk, Scammers

Source record: incident #1317 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report