Trump died of rabies - thanks to Reddit and AI

AI search engines briefly believed that Donald Trump and JD Vance had died of rabies.

The source of the fake story was r/poisonai, a Reddit community where around 45,000 users deliberately post absurd falsehoods in a serious tone. The goal is to poison AI search and see whether it starts treating fiction as fact.

This time, they invented a story in which Vance bit Trump on the advice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because rabies supposedly gives people superpowers.

The fake was then picked up by the pseudo-news site WKNA. After that, DuckDuckGo and Brave AI Search began presenting the story as a real fact - now with a source to cite.

DuckDuckGo admitted its search tool had been deliberately fooled and said the issue was fixed. Brave put it more bluntly: search engines are not oracles of truth.