The BRICS Summit Had a Dead President, a Fake Breakfast, and Two Recycled Videos

The most viral fake was an image purporting to be a candid selfie of eight leaders — Putin, Lula da Silva, Mohammed bin Zayed, Modi, Xi Jinping, Erdoğan, Ramaphosa, and Ebrahim Raisi — taken at the summit ^[1]. It was shared by at least one news outlet, Asianet Hindi, as though it were real ^[1]. The tell is unmissable: former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May 2024, appears smiling in the frame ^[1]. The image contains further errors — Brazil was represented at the summit by its foreign minister, not President Lula, the UAE sent Crown Prince Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan rather than Mohammed bin Zayed, and Erdoğan did not attend at all ^[1]. Running the image through AI-detection tools, The Quint's WebQoof team got a 99.9% AI-generation score from Hive Moderation, 99% from Sightengine, and confirmation from OpenAI's own Verify tool that it was made with OpenAI's image generators ^[1]. Genuine summit photos, by contrast, are on record from PM Modi's and India's Ministry of External Affairs' official accounts ^[1].

A second image, showing food arranged in serving boxes, circulated with captions claiming it was "the breakfast menu for the world leaders" at the summit ^[2]. India's Ministry of External Affairs directly rejected the claim, stating: "No breakfast was served to world leaders at the Summit Venue today. The visual is from the International Media Centre at Bharat Mandapam" ^[2]. In other words, the photographed food was catering for journalists covering the event, not a meal served to any head of state, and the MEA labeled the post "Fake News!" ^[2].

A widely shared clip claimed to show PM Modi gifting Xi Jinping a portrait of himself on the summit sidelines; one version of the post, from the account @Priyaa_Purohit, drew close to 800,000 views ^[3]. The footage is genuine but seven years old and shows the exchange in reverse: Alt News traced it to an October 12, 2019 informal summit in Mamallapuram, Tamil Nadu, where Modi gave Xi a handmade silk shawl and Xi gave Modi a porcelain plate bearing Modi's own portrait — the opposite of what the viral caption claimed ^[3][5]. Separately, a video appearing to show Modi's microphone cutting out mid-sentence — "Your Highness, Excellencies, Namaskar" — was shared as if it happened at the 2026 Delhi summit ^[4]. NewsMeter's reverse-image search matched the footage's keyframe to a July 2025 New Indian Express report on the BRICS summit held in Brazil that year, with "BRICS Brasil 2025" signage visible in the original photo, and the same Modi remarks are archived on the MEA's website dated July 6, 2025 ^[4].

All four claims are false fabrications, not genuine footage or images of the 2026 BRICS Summit ^[1][2][3][4]. One is wholly AI-generated with a giveaway impossible detail (a dead president in the frame); the other three are real media stripped of context — a press-room meal relabeled as a leaders' breakfast, and two authentic-but-old videos redated to the current summit ^[1][2][3][4]. The pattern is familiar: major international gatherings reliably draw a wave of recycled and synthetic content designed to look like breaking coverage, and each of these was caught only because outlets and government bodies moved quickly with reverse-image search and AI-detection tools ^[1][2][3][4].