Google falsely said Sam Altman was dead — and suggested vandalized public sources could be to blame

• Sam Altman is alive, despite a temporary Google search result claiming he died on Wednesday.
• Google acknowledged the false result and suggested vandalism on public sources could be to blame.
• The Wikipedia page for Sam Altman was edited on Wednesday to falsely say he had been assassinated.

Sam Altman is not dead, contrary to what a Google result earlier today may have told you.

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

Google acknowledged the incorrect result several hours later.

“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.”

Google declined to comment when reached by Business Insider.

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

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.

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.

Wikipedia did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Google’s knowledge panels, the information that appears at the top of some search results, draw on a variety of public sources.

“Wikipedia is a commonly-cited source, but it’s not the only one,” Google said in a post 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.”

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.”

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.