How Reddit trolls tricked DuckDuckGo’s AI into falling for a Trump rabies hoax

DuckDuckGo’s AI search tool is telling users that Donald Trump died of rabies in early June. The chatbot also claims Vice President JD Vance died from the same virus shortly before Trump.

Well, of course, that’s not true, and neither of them has rabies.

The false results come from a coordinated campaign on a subreddit called r/poisonai. The forum has about 45,000 members who post fake information specifically to see if AI models will scrape it. They decided to focus on a story about Vance getting rabies. Users spent weeks posting detailed fake accounts of his death. They included fake Truth Social posts and complained in the comments when AI models correctly identified the story as a hoax.

All this eventually paid off for the Redditors because DuckDuckGo’s AI picked up the poisoned information.

For those unfamiliar, the search engine generates answers using third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral. When users asked if Trump or Vance got rabies, the AI confirmed the hoax. The tech publication Futurism first reported the issue and found that the chatbot was citing a site called WKNA News as its primary source.

WKNA presents itself as a local West Virginia news station. But if you look deeper, it is actually a site that publishes AI-generated content with seemingly no human editing. The site scraped the rabies hoax from the Reddit forum and wrote full articles treating it as real news.

One of the WKNA articles cited by DuckDuckGo claimed Trump was bitten by Vance on purpose. The article said Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Trump the infection would give him superpowers. DuckDuckGo’s AI also linked to a real ABC News article about a rabies death in Ohio that had nothing to do with the politicians.

The report from Futurism also pointed out that Brave’s AI search also started telling users Vance died of rabies. It gave a specific date of June 5.

A spokesperson for Brave told the publication that users need to fact-check the AI themselves. They said if people plant stories to poison AI, the search results will adapt to include those stories.

Following the initial reports, DuckDuckGo disabled the AI assistant for these specific search queries. In our tests, the AI-generated answer no longer appears for queries regarding Trump and Vance catching or dying from rabies.

We also tested the same query on Brave’s AI search and found that it has since picked up the reports debunking the claims and now rightfully mentions that it was “part of a coordinated online misinformation campaign.”

DuckDuckGo has yet to issue any statement regarding the mess up with its AI.

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