Google showed a search result Wednesday saying OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had died that day, after users flagged it on X and Reddit. Google responded hours later on X that the result was gone and wasn’t a manual change, and that vandalism of public information sources can affect what appears in Search. Altman’s Wikipedia page was edited 22 times Wednesday, against five edits over the rest of the month, including one claiming he’d been assassinated and later ones repeating the claim and altering his surname. The Wikimedia Foundation told Business Insider that volunteers reverted the edits within 1 to 43 minutes and semi-protected the page, which limits editing to established accounts. Google says its knowledge panels draw on hundreds of sources, with Wikipedia commonly cited but not the only one.
