Purported AI Voice Cloning Used to Impersonate Secretary of State Marco Rubio
June 15, 2025
The impersonator contacted at least five high-ranking officials, including three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a member of Congress, via Signal and text messages. The purported aim was to coerce these individuals into disclosing sensitive information or granting access to accounts.
Such incidents highlight the need for responsible AI governance and trustworthy AI practices. Project Cerebellum's AI incident database serves as a crucial resource for harm prevention, providing guardrails for AI that ensure safe and secure interactions.
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Matched TAIM controls
Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls
- GOVERN 1.7 — similarity 0.621, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
- GOVERN 1.2 — similarity 0.612, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
- MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.611, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →
- Alleged deployer
- unknown-actors-impersonating-marco-rubio, unknown-actors
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- united-states-department-of-state, officials-targeted-by-impersonator-of-marco-rubio, marco-rubio, government-of-the-united-states, epistemic-integrity, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1141
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.