Sam Altman is alive. But for a few hours, Wednesday 12 August, those looking for the name of the CEO of OpenAI on Google he found himself in front of an information sheet complete with the date of death. It was the fault of a vandalistic edit on the entrepreneur’s Wikipedia entry, which was automatically taken up by Knowledge Graph by Google and turned into a viral error on social media and the tech community.
The sequence starts when a user modifies Altman’s English page by inserting a false date of death and the narration of an assassination that took place in Seattle. The text remains online for approximately forty-two minutes, until it is corrected by a volunteer. It is not an isolated episode: on the same day the voice records 22 changescompared to an average of five in the entire previous month. Other vandalism includes a reference to Altman as “dropout” (in a derogatory sense to indicate someone who has abandoned studies or the conventional path) and the alteration of the surname to “Gayman”.
How the fake data arrived on Google
The mechanism behind the error concerns the functioning of the information panels of Google Search. Knowledge panels, in fact, are populated through automatic scraping of public sources, and Wikipedia is among the most used for biographies and personal data. The system then caught the vandal change before an algorithm or human reviewer could filter it, and displayed the date of death next to the CEO’s name, while in the same box Altman continued to be listed as OpenAI’s current CEO. A contradiction that made the error even more evident to users who noticed the anomaly on X and Reddit.
Google confirmed the error hours later with a post on X. This was reported by Business Insider, which also collected the Wikimedia Foundation’s position on the episode. Google also clarified, through an official post on knowledge panels, that these boxes draw from “hundreds of sources across the web, including data licenses appearing in knowledge panels for music, sports and TV”and that Wikipedia remains a common source but not the only one.
Wikimedia’s response
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation explained that the page had been taken down semi-protection: from now on, only accounts registered for at least four days and with at least ten edits behind them can edit it, one of the standard countermeasures that Wikipedia applies to entries subject to repeated vandalism. The foundation also recalled that, in general, “Most acts of vandalism are dealt with within ten minutes”as he defines the episode “a good example of how Wikimedia’s voluntary model works in real time to ensure the quality of knowledge”.
OpenAI had no comment on the episode. Google, contacted by Business Insider, preferred not to add statements beyond the post published on
