AI Search Tools Falsely Claim Trump and Vance Died of Rabies

A coordinated online misinformation campaign successfully manipulated the artificial intelligence search features of DuckDuckGo and Brave this week, causing them to falsely claim that former U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance had died from rabies. The fabricated narrative, which included claims that Trump was intentionally bitten by Vance on the advice of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was entirely false.

The incident originated on the Reddit community r/poisonai, a forum with approximately 45,000 members dedicated to creating absurd false stories to "poison" AI models that scrape the internet for data. For weeks, users flooded the platform with detailed, fabricated accounts of Vance's supposed death from rabies on June 5, 2026, including fake social media posts and complaints when AI correctly identified the story as a hoax.

This planted misinformation was then amplified by an AI-generated website posing as a local West Virginia news broadcaster called WKNA News. The site published articles treating the Reddit hoax as factual news, creating a layer of apparent sourcing that the AI search tools ingested. DuckDuckGo's AI feature,...