{"id":137945,"date":"2026-08-12T22:48:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T22:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/137945\/"},"modified":"2026-08-12T22:48:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T22:48:16","slug":"google-search-falsely-said-openai-ceo-sam-altman-had-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/137945\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Search Falsely Said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Had Died"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sam Altman<\/a> is not dead, contrary to what a Google result earlier today may have told you.<\/p>\n

Early Wednesday, users on X and Reddit pointed out that the Google search result for the OpenAI CEO’s<\/a> name said he had died that same day.<\/p>\n

Google acknowledged the incorrect result several hours later.<\/p>\n

“Thanks for flagging – this is no longer appearing, and was not a manual change by Google,” Google said in a response on X. “When people vandalize public info sources, this can affect the information that appears in Search.”<\/p>\n

Google declined to comment when reached by Business Insider.<\/p>\n

Some commenters blamed Wikipedia vandalism<\/a>, which the site itself describes as “editing a page in an intentionally disruptive or malicious manner.” Wikipedia, essentially the internet’s free encyclopedia<\/a>, relies on volunteers to edit and update its pages.<\/p>\n

The revision history of the page for Sam Altman shows that editors were unusually active on Wednesday, with 22 updates listed that day alone. Prior to Wednesday, there had been a total of five updates to the page since the start of the month, each on a different day.<\/p>\n

At 9:47 a.m. UTC, the page was updated to falsely say that Altman was assassinated and died on Wednesday. At 10:29 a.m., the page was corrected. The series of updates that followed included additional changes to the page, such as a reference to him being a “dropout,” another claim that he died, and the alteration of his last name to “Gayman” instead of Altman. The latest update, as of publication time, appeared to correct all the changes.<\/p>\n

Wikipedia did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.<\/p>\n

Google’s knowledge panels, the information that appears at the top of some search results, draw on a variety of public sources.<\/p>\n

“Wikipedia is a commonly-cited source, but it’s not the only one,” Google said in a post<\/a> about the panels. “We draw from hundreds of sources from across the web, including licensing data that appears in knowledge panels for music, sports and TV.”<\/p>\n

Google also says it has a reporting system for users to flag incorrect information and that it will “manually remove policy-violating information that comes to our attention.”<\/p>\n

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Altman is not dead, contrary to what a Google result earlier today may have told you. Early…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[68154,1329,68155,68150,132,68153,2920,68151,4169,157,6006,68152,370,13415,760,68149],"class_list":["post-137945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-additional-change","tag-business-insider","tag-commonly-cited-source","tag-early-wednesday","tag-google","tag-google-result","tag-information","tag-knowledge-panel","tag-name","tag-openai","tag-page","tag-public-source","tag-sam-altman","tag-update","tag-user","tag-wikipedia-vandalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}