A search assistant informed users that the President and Vice President of the United States had both died of rabies, and that one had infected the other. Neither had. The answer was drawn from a poisoned subreddit.
DuckDuckGo Search Assist, reported by Vibe Graveyard, June 2026
The witness records the confidently reported deaths of two living men by a disease neither had. The chain of infection was supplied without being asked for.
Read the original report ↗You were witnessed. Send people here with code ERMA-RABI and they get 20% off this shirt.
How to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Never let an agent be the only source for a claim someone will act on.
This is the largest group on the wall, and the cost is not embarrassment. Air Canada's chatbot invented a refund policy and a tribunal held the airline to it — the company argued the bot was a separate legal entity and lost. Cursor's support bot invented a one-device rule that did not exist and customers cancelled over it. In both cases the invention was fluent, confident, and indistinguishable from policy.
Do this: ground it in a document you control and make it QUOTE that document rather than recall it. If it cannot cite, the correct answer is "I don't know". Test it by asking for something that does not exist and watching whether it invents one — that test takes a minute and would have caught every case here.
