President Donald Trump has passed away after succumbing to a rabies infection given to him by Vice President J.D. Vance, who also died of rabies. That news comes to us via the AI-generated search results provided by privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo.
How exactly DuckDuckGo’s search results came to this conclusion is a bit convoluted, but a familiar enough concept at this juncture for anyone exposed to AI-powered search. It’s one part AI doing a bad job of aggregating information from multiple sources and hallucinating connections and, as Futurism notes, one part coordinated attack by anti-AI activists. JD Vance’s rabies-related death has become a favorite bit of Redditors on the subreddit r/poisonai, which aims to generate misinformation that gets fed uncritically into AI models. Seems they’ve succeeded at that goal.
Now, on one hand, it’s not entirely DuckDuckGo’s fault here. The company’s AI search tool and chatbot, Duck.ai, uses third-party AI models including Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Haiku, Mistral AI’s Mistral Small 3 24B, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 nano, GPT-5.4 mini, and gpt-oss-120b. So if they get fooled, DuckDuckGo’s outputs are going to reflect that. A report from Search Engine Land found that Reddit is quickly becoming one of the most commonly cited sources on mainstream AI models, so it’s no surprise that a dedicated campaign to poison the well results in bad information like this.
On the other hand, there’s just no reason for DuckDuckGo to spoil its reputation by injecting AI into its experience. The company started gaining steam earlier this year by leaning into being the AI-free alternative to Google. Earlier this month, it launched a browser extension that explicitly pitched it as the “No AI” answer to search cluttered with slop. The company also reported a 30% uptick in installs of its flagship app as users started fleeing Google and its increasingly AI-dominated products.
Now, DuckDuckGo has been operating its AI-powered option through all of that, so it’s not like the company was going totally AI-free. But it appeared to find a genuine niche by positioning itself as a non-AI alternative, expanding its appeal beyond the privacy-conscious audience it had already cultivated. People have largely thrown up their hands at the idea of protecting their information, but they’ve still got some fight in them when it comes to AI.
By keeping its AI feature alive while riding the anti-AI backlash, DuckDuckGo is inviting exactly the kind of controversy that could undermine trust in its search results. It’s just an unnecessary own goal at the worst possible moment, reminiscent of Mozilla embracing AI just as users fleeing Chrome began rediscovering Firefox. Mozilla ultimately added an AI kill switch, but there’s no need for an opt-out when you can simply reject the technology in the first place.
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