Is the viral selfie featuring Russia's Vladimir Putin surrounded by BRICS leaders an actual photo documenting the group's summit in September 2026? No, that's not true: Three online detectors ruled that it was made by AI. Lead Stories did not find any examples of credible media organizations using the image to cover the summit.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X by the @EmbassyofRussia account on Sept. 13, 2026. The caption read:
#BRICS is a #SUPERPOWER 🔥
This is what the image shared in the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @EmbassyofRussia on X.)
The picture went viral at the time of the September 2026 BRICS summit (archived here).
BRICS is a group of states (archived here) that includes countries such as Russia, China, Iran, and India.
The account of the Russian embassy in South Africa (archived here) that posted the image reviewed in this fact check was real: The website of the embassy linked to it (archived here).
The picture, nevertheless, was not authentic.
Putin is not known for taking and publishing selfies. In 2017, he said (archived here) he wasn't on social media.
Hive Moderation said that the image was 99.9% likely "to contain AI generated or deepfake content":
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
Sightengine concluded that the image was 99% likely to have been generated by AI:
(Image source: Sightengine.)
Lead Stories submitted the picture to the OpenAI verification tool that searched for the SynthID watermark (archived here), an invisible signal embedded by Google AI tools to identify AI-generated content. Here is the conclusion:
(Image source: OpenAI.)
A Google reverse image search (archived here) did not return any news articles from credible media organizations using the image to report on the 2026 BRICS summit.
