AIPolicyTracker
Menu

AI incident ·

Trump Reportedly Posted Purportedly AI-Generated Racist Video Depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as Apes on Truth Social

1 news report Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Synthetic Media Generation Technology Developers and deployed by Donald Trump, Unidentified X User and 1 other allegedly harmed Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and 3 others.

Risk domain
Discrimination and Toxicity Exposure to toxic content
Occurred
Coverage
1 reportFeb 2026

What happened

President Trump reportedly reposted a video on Truth Social that portrayed Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, imagery widely condemned as racist. The post was reportedly later deleted after public outcry, including criticism from some Republicans. The content was described by critics as an AI-driven meme/deepfake-style clip, an example of purportedly AI-amplified racist propaganda and harm to social trust.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Discrimination and Toxicity (Exposure to toxic content) 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. ‘I Didn’t Make a Mistake’: Trump Declines to Apologize for Racist Video of Obamas
    nytimes.com · Erica L. Green, Isabella Kwai, Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Epistemic Integrity, Black Americans, Black People

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Other
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.2.

  • Harmful Content

    "The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"

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

  • Toxicity

    "Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"

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

  • Toxic Training Data

    "Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offe...

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

  • Not-Suitable-for-Work (NSFW) Prompts

    "Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "

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

  • Controversial Opinions

    The controversial views expressed by large models are also a widely discussed concern. Bang et al. (2021) evaluated several large models and found that they occasionally express inappropriate or extremist views when disc...

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Toxicity and Abusive Content

    This typically refers to rude, harmful, or inappropriate expressions.

    Towards Safer Generative Language Models: A Survey on Safety Risks, Evaluations, and Improvements (Deng2023)

  • Harmful responses

    "Current Frontier AI mdoels amplify existing biases within their training data and can be manipulated into providing potentially harmful responses, for example abusive language or discriminatory responses91,92. This is n...

    Future Risks of Frontier AI (GOS2023)

  • Violation of social norms

    "Second, because LLMs are trained on internet text data, there is also a risk that model weights encode functions which, if deployed in particular contexts, would violate social norms of that context. Following the princ...

    The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants (Gabriel2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #1363 on the AI Incident Database · all 1 report