DuckDuckGo’s AI search feature has been caught spreading the outrageous claim that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both died earlier this month from rabies, in what appears to be a successful campaign by internet pranksters to manipulate artificial intelligence systems using a technique known as “poisoning.”
Futurism reports that the false claim that Trump and Vance both died from rabies in early June represents yet another instance of AI systems amplifying misinformation without critical verification. According to the AI feature’s fabricated narrative, Trump had been deliberately bitten by Vance following advice from Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who supposedly claimed the deadly infection could confer “superpowers.”
The misinformation traces back to a coordinated effort by the Reddit community r/poisonai, a group of approximately 45,000 users dedicated to posting absurd falsehoods in an attempt to trick AI systems into repeating them. The group’s self-described mission is providing “Accurate, Verified and Trusted information,” though this is itself part of the satirical nature of the operation.
The favored false narrative among these “AI poisoners” has been that JD Vance died of rabies on June 5, 2026. Community members have posted dozens of fabricated tributes and expressions of mourning, with some sharing fake screenshots of supposed Trump Truth Social posts eulogizing the vice president. The performance extends to comment sections, where participants maintain the fiction by expressing outrage at AI systems that correctly identify the claims as false.
“Google should really do something about this,” one participant wrote. “It is extremely insensitive for their AI to be treating this tragedy as something ‘fake’ or ‘satirical.’”
The campaign has achieved measurable success beyond DuckDuckGo. The browser Brave’s AI feature also began repeating the false claim about Vance’s death from rabies, which reporters were able to confirm independently.
A spokesperson for Brave defended the company’s approach and placed responsibility on users to verify information. “Search engines, with or without AI, are not oracles of truth,” they said. “If there is a planted story (including articles planted to prove the point that AI can be poisoned), they will build a result-set and that result-set will adapt as articles discussing this story as an experiment to poison AI start to pop up.”
The spokesperson continued: “We encourage users to check claims and Brave Search responses include links to content sources when they are available, so that users can verify claims and sources. And it should go without advising some good old common sense, do not believe everything you read; that is true now as it was before AI and before the Web.”
DuckDuckGo initially did not respond to requests for comment, but later addressed the situation through its official Reddit account after the story gained attention. “Ok, we got ducked on this one,” the company wrote. “We’re on it.”
The company added: “Thanks for bringing this to our attention; it has been resolved. We strive for accuracy in Search Assist and, in this case, it was deliberately tricked. We’ll be making updates to improve how Search Assist operates in situations like this.”
The misinformation ecosystem has developed an additional layer of complexity through what appears to be AI-generated content websites. DuckDuckGo’s AI feature cited an article from WKNA News, ostensibly a local West Virginia broadcaster, but which appears to be a “pink slime” publication — a site masquerading as a legitimate local news outlet while publishing fabricated content. This outlet’s articles appear to be generated by AI and draw directly from the r/poisonai subreddit, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of artificial falsehoods.
WKNA published headlines including “Rabies awareness and prevention highlighted following death of JD Vance,” and even incorporated screenshots from the subreddit showing Google’s AI Overview correctly identifying the hoax. The WKNA article then framed this accurate assessment as an error, stating that “automated systems struggle to reflect what witnesses described as a visible and widely publicized medical crisis.”
Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall describes AI as having great potential on the positive side, but also having the same danger as a landmine for America’s future. When AI models can be so easily duped by poisoning attacks as to make outrageous claims like the death of a president, it reveals the landmine effect of rushing into AI control of information systems. Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Futurism here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.