State Department Apologizes for an AI-Made Map That Moved Nigeria Into the Sahara

The U.S. State Department has apologized after presenting a map of Africa at an international AIDS conference on which not one of the highlighted countries was correctly placed.

The slide appeared during a State Department presentation at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, an event on new health funding agreements with African governments. Six countries were called out: Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Côte d'Ivoire, Malawi and Cameroon. Every label pointed to the wrong place. Nigeria, which has more than 500 miles of Atlantic coastline, was shown landlocked in the Sahara. Mozambique, on the southeast coast, was relocated to the Horn of Africa. Côte d'Ivoire appeared on the wrong side of the continent. The borders of Uganda and Malawi were redrawn outright, and the colors on the map did not match the labels attached to them.

A Reuters analysis of the presentation found a watermark on the image indicating it had been produced with OpenAI tools. OpenAI told Reuters it was looking into it.

The department did not dispute the errors. "This was an unfortunate error caused by a team member who hastily altered the slide deck immediately before the presentation at the AIDS 2026 Conference," it said in a statement, adding that it takes "full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation."

The reaction in Rio was less about cartography than about what the slide implied. Emily Bass, a longtime analyst of the global AIDS response, called the errors "disrespectful to African collaborators." Matt Petit of the Atlantic Council said whoever assembled the deck "did not care enough about the subject matter to bother" checking it.

That reading is sharpened by what the presentation was for. The Trump administration cut foreign aid budgets sharply and dismantled USAID last year, disrupting PEPFAR — the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, credited with saving more than 25 million lives since it was created in 2003. Core antiretroviral drug provision has since resumed, but spending on prevention and disease surveillance has fallen, and the administration has laid out plans to phase out PEPFAR operations in South Africa, which has the largest HIV-positive population in the world.

The slide was meant to show which countries were signing on to a new bilateral health funding framework — the successor arrangement to the programs that were cut. Delegates who work in those six countries watched a U.S. government presentation that could not locate any of them.

The episode also lands in the middle of a wider federal push to fold generative AI into routine government work. The department has not said whether the map was checked by anyone before it went on screen, or what its policy is on using AI-generated graphics in official presentations.