Tag: search engine

DuckDuckGo AI Tells Users Donald Trump and JD Vance Have Died from Rabies

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.

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Nobody needs AI to search the Internet, court says in ruling against Google

Potentially impacting all AI search engines and chatbots known to poorly paraphrase source links, a German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements in AI Overviews.

The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google’s AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like “Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam,” Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.

Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren’t always accurate and must be verified.

But the court found that, unlike traditional search engines that merely present lists of links to third-party statements, Google’s tool made “independent, new, and substantive statements” based on its own misinterpretation of links on the Internet.

That’s a problem, the court said, because while publishers may have been able to sue to stop third parties from publishing defamatory statements appearing in Google search results, only Google can correct the underlying algorithm and outputs displayed in AI Overviews. And because, at least initially, the company did not, it therefore “must be held accountable,” the court ruled. Beyond that, Google’s argument was deemed particularly weak, since the AI overview in this case “contains statements that do not appear in the search results at all.”

The court’s order—requiring a temporary injunction barring Google from spreading the false claims in any further AI Overviews—may have global implications, as the court seems to be the first to hold an AI firm liable for AI speech.

In the past, AI firms have hoped that disclaimers warning about misinformation would protect them from lawsuits over untrustworthy outputs. Last year, one chatbot maker even argued that AI speech is its own category of “pure speech” and the First Amendment should protect it.

According to a Google translation of the German court ruling, however, the false outputs were “primarily an expression of the defendant’s commercial activity,” and the AI tool’s “opinions” and false statements were capable of impacting public opinion.

The court concluded that, in weighing the balance, publishers’ interest in removing the false information outweighed Google’s commercial speech rights.

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Signal, DuckDuckGo, and NordVPN threaten to exit Canada if metadata surveillance law passes

Another day, another government attempt to force tech companies to build backdoors. This time, Canada is proposing legislation that would require companies to retain certain metadata and provide law enforcement with access to it. Predictably, many tech players have sharply criticized the proposal, with some saying they would rather leave the Canadian market than comply.

The latest version of Canada’s Bill C-22 would require digital services such as internet service providers, messaging platforms, email providers, and potentially hardware companies to retain up to one year of user metadata. In addition, tech companies would have to implement mechanisms that allow authorities to obtain “lawful access” to that information for criminal investigations. Critics argue the proposal amounts to another government-mandated backdoor.

During his testimony before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Signal executive Udbhav Tiwari said Bill C-22 would turn everyday digital tools into a surveillance network. He argued that requiring companies to retain metadata about users’ communications runs counter to Signal’s privacy practices.

A spokesperson for DuckDuckGo also confirmed that the company would remove its VPN service from Canada if Bill C-22 passes. NordVPN and other VPN providers have made similar statements.

Apple and Google have also joined industry warnings that the legislation could force them to weaken encryption. Last year, Apple successfully opposed a similar proposal in the United Kingdom that would have required it to build a backdoor into iCloud. The incident was the latest in a series of conflicts between the Cupertino-based company and government regulators over security and user privacy.

The primary concern is that malicious actors would inevitably discover and exploit any digital backdoor, regardless of whether it was designed exclusively for law enforcement or domestic government agencies. OpenMedia, which has described C-22 as an attempt to create a surveillance state, pointed to a late-2024 incident in which Chinese state-backed hackers compromised government-mandated police wiretap systems to steal sensitive data from AT&T, Verizon, Lumen Technologies, and other telecom providers.

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