A viral audio clip suggesting tension between Vice President JD Vance and senior Trump advisor Elon Musk circulated on social media this week, but experts have now determined the recording is AI-generated.
The audio, which began circulating Sunday on social media platforms, features what sounds like Vance saying, “He’s making us look bad. He’s making me look bad,” before making xenophobic comments: “He’s not even American. He’s from South Africa. And he’s cosplaying as this great American leader.” The clip quickly accumulated millions of views on TikTok, Reddit, and X.
“It’s a fake AI-generated clip,” Vance wrote on social media after the recording went viral. “I’m not surprised this guy doesn’t have the intelligence to recognize this fact, but I wonder if he has the integrity to delete it now that he knows it’s false.”
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Multiple artificial intelligence experts have confirmed the recording’s inauthenticity after subjecting it to forensic analysis.
“We believe this audio is likely fake and possibly generated via artificial intelligence,” V.S. Subrahmanian, a Northwestern University computer science professor who analyzed the recording using deepfake detection algorithms, said in a report by The San Francisco Standard.
Researchers identified several red flags, including unnatural background noise that appears deliberately added to confuse automated detection tools.
“AI tools are super good at catching subtle things that our ears might not pick up,” explained Manjeet Rege, director of the University of St. Thomas’s Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence. “They analyze the rhythm and pacing of audio, looking for weird pauses or sudden changes that don’t sound like real human speech.”
The real White House leak
Speaking of leaks and JD Vance, the Trump administration on Monday confirmed a genuine security breach involving The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, who was inadvertently included in a private Signal chat where senior officials discussed military attacks on Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
Goldberg was inadvertently added to a group chat titled “Houthi PC small group,” where high-level officials, including what appeared to be Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, discussed imminent strikes against Houthi strongholds.
“I have never seen a breach quite like this,” Goldberg wrote. The National Security Council confirmed the incident, with spokesperson Brian Hughes acknowledging that “the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
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