DuckDuckGo has built its reputation on privacy-first search, but this week, its AI assistant landed in hot water for an entirely different reason. Apparently, Duck.ai confidently claimed that U.S. President Donald Trump had died of rabies earlier this month, complete with fabricated details about Vice President JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and fake supporting news reports. None of it was true.
According to Futurism, the bizarre response wasn’t the result of a single hallucination. Instead, it appears to have been triggered by a coordinated misinformation campaign originating from Reddit’s r/poisonai community, where users deliberately post absurd fake stories designed to “poison” AI search models. In this case, members flooded the internet with fabricated claims that JD Vance had died of rabies before Donald Trump supposedly succumbed to the same disease, even creating fake news articles and spoofing local news websites to reinforce the narrative.
Duck.ai wasn’t the only casualty. Futurism also found that Brave Search’s AI repeated similar false claims before later correcting itself. DuckDuckGo, meanwhile, acknowledged the mistake on Reddit with a tongue-in-cheek response: “Ok, we got ducked on this one.” The company said the issue had been resolved and added that Search Assist had been “deliberately tricked,” promising improvements to better handle similar attacks in the future.
The report also notes that the fake story gained credibility because AI search cited a fabricated website posing as a legitimate local news outlet, which itself appeared to be generated using AI and stitched together from the same Reddit hoax. In other words, the AI wasn’t simply making things up. It was confidently repeating misinformation that had been deliberately planted across the web.
The funny thing is that this isn’t really a DuckDuckGo problem. It’s an AI search problem. Modern AI assistants increasingly rely on information gathered from across the web, and if enough fake content is published in enough places, those systems can begin treating fiction as fact.
That’s what makes this incident so concerning. We’ve spent years worrying about AI hallucinating answers out of thin air, but coordinated attempts to poison AI search could prove even more dangerous. If bad actors can manipulate what AI models “learn” simply by flooding the internet with convincing misinformation, then improving AI isn’t just about building smarter models anymore. It’s about building systems that know who, and what, they should trust.
Artificial intelligence has already helped write code, discover drugs, and generate videos. Now, it’s trying to make a better burger. Researchers at Stanford University have unveiled BurgerAI, a new AI system that designs burger recipes by balancing taste, nutrition, sustainability, and cost. The surprising part? In blind taste tests, diners liked some of the AI-created burgers just as much as, and in some cases more than, a popular fast-food burger.
BurgerAI is designed to invent recipes, not copy them
OpenAI has officially taken the wraps off GPT-5.6, its most advanced family of AI models to date. There’s just one catch: unless you’re one of a handful of approved customers, you won’t be able to try it anytime soon. Instead of a broad launch, the company is beginning with a tightly controlled preview while it works through a new U.S. government review process.
GPT-5.6 is here, but only a few people can use it
Your PC and laptop runs hotter every year, especially now that AI tools and heavy software push it harder than ever. Heat is a real bottleneck for performance, which is why people have gone to wild lengths to solve it, like strapping an actual ice machine to an RTX GPU. A new study points to a far less extreme fix for this problem, and it involves bacteria (via TechXplore).
Researchers have developed a new way to grow thermal interface materials, the substances that sit between a chip and its cooling system to help heat escape faster. The process involves feeding bacteria sugar and metal ions, letting the microbes build the material naturally instead of relying on traditional chemical manufacturing.
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