Video of Donald Trump announcing US ban on Tesla production is fake

Days after a very public row erupted between US President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, a video which appears to show the president announcing a ban on Tesla production in the US has been circulating on social media.

But President Trump didn't say this, and the clip was edited using artificial intelligence (AI).

In the video, President Trump supposedly says: “Today I am here to announce that I will be banning the production of all Teslas in the United States of America effective immediately. As everyone knows Elon stabbed me in the back a couple of days ago and went crazy on his platform, X”.

Tesla is an electric car company led by Mr Musk. Although there were reports of investors selling off shares in the company after the disagreement became public, we could find no credible reports of the president saying he would ban production in the United States.

Where did the video come from?

The earliest example we could find of the clip was posted on Instagram on 7 June by an account called @dangerousaireturns whose linked YouTube account DangerousAI states that they make parody AI videos.

Some versions being shared on social media also include the @dangerousai2 TikTok handle in the watermark that shares a similar name to the Instagram account. That video on TikTok has since been deleted but still appears in Google search results. A Facebook version under Thedangerousai handle is still live.

When contacted, the DangerousAI YouTube channel took credit for creating the video using AI.

It seems to be an edited version of a real clip of Mr Trump. Using Google Lens, Full Fact traced the original clip to videos of him speaking in the Oval Office next to Mr Musk on 30 May, where he is wearing the same outfit. The altered clip appears to have been horizontally flipped, so the pin badge of the United States flag appears on President Trump’s right lapel, instead of his left in the original video.

President Trump makes no mention of banning Tesla production in the United States in the original video.

Several things also suggest the audio of President Trump speaking in the viral video is a deepfake.

Rita Singh, a scientist and expert in human voice profiling technologies at the Center for Voice Intelligence and Security, Carnegie Mellon University in the US, told Full Fact that the audio shows “classic hallmarks of being AI-generated” such as there being “no intervocalic breath sounds whatsoever” and “inconsistent” speech patterns.

She explained: “The audio shows that the unique vocal patterns that are typically consistent for a single speaker across different sounds, are not uniform in this recording. Additionally, the way sounds blend together and affect each other's frequency characteristics varies in an unnatural way between different speech sounds and different instances of the same speech sounds.”

The version circulating on social media is also blurry around the mouth. As Dr Dominic Lees, Associate Professor from the University of Reading and expert in generative AI, has previously told us, this is a sign a deepfake has been poorly lip-synced with footage because artificial intelligence finds it “very difficult to generate a natural look in the teeth so often leave this blurry and out-of-focus”.

As technology advances, deepfakes are becoming increasingly realistic and harder to distinguish from genuine footage. Our guide to spotting deepfake videos and AI audio provides practical tools to help tell whether they’re genuine.