Viral Putin, Modi and Xi selfie at BRICS summit is AI-generated

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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.

Russia’s embassy in South Africa shared the photo with the message “BRICS is a superpower”, with the post receiving millions of views. Official Iranian embassy accounts in India and Armenia also shared the image.

One of the selfies appears to show Russian President Vladimir Putin taking a selfie alongside the BRICS world leaders: Chinese President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian is also present in the "selfie", alongside leaders from Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia, as well as Abu Dhabi’s President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed.

The image, however, is AI-generated.

The picture contains an invisible digital watermark known as SynthID, which indicates that it was created using OpenAI tools.

There are also several clues in the image itself.

Lula did not attend the BRICS summit. Brazil was instead represented by Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, who was pictured with Modi at the event. And while Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed is shown in the selfie, Abu Dhabi was represented at the summit by Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

A second AI-generated selfie claiming to show BRICS leaders together has also circulated online.

This version again appears to have been taken by Putin but includes former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The image was shared by several Indian social media accounts, including one belonging to Shazia Ilmi, a spokesperson for India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Ilmi posted the image with the caption “this pic says all” and tagged opposition politicians, including opposition leader Rahul Gandhi.

But the image contains even more obvious inconsistencies.

While neither Lula nor Erdogan was present, Turkey is not even a BRICS member or partner country. A more glaring error is that the selfie includes Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May 2024.

Ilmi later deleted the post and described sharing the image as a “mistake”.