A viral selfie allegedly showing leaders including, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra at the BRICS summit in New Delhi is AI-generated. A SynthID watermark shows it was created using OpenAI tools. Several leaders pictured, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, did not attend. Another AI selfie features former Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi, who died in 2024. Both images were widely shared online, including by official embassy accounts. Vedika Bahl fact-checks.
The BRICS 2026 summit in New Delhi brought together leaders from some of the world’s major emerging economies, as the bloc pushes for a greater role in global affairs. But amid the official summit images, two unofficial selfies falsely portraying world leaders together and fuelling claims of BRICS unity have gone viral.
