State Department’s map at AIDS conference mislabels countries in Africa

The Trump administration didn’t need another example of rank incompetence, but it stumbled onto one anyway. Reuters reported:

A U.S. government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at ‌a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online.

Reuters viewed a video of the presentation given at the AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, which shows the errant map displayed halfway during a presentation about the State Department’s new health agreements.

The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the “unfortunate error” and blamed an unnamed staffer who “hastily altered” a slide deck before the event.

Part of the problem with this is the underlying circumstances: This was an international AIDS conference held as the United States is moving backward on the issue, to the detriment of countless Africans.

As The New York Times reported, “The Trump administration’s cuts to the largest global H.I.V. program last year have resulted in drastic drops in both prevention efforts and treatment. The program, known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, supported treatment for about 77,000 fewer children in 2025 than it had the previous year, a 14 percent decline, according to a study, the results of which are expected to be presented at the conference this week.”

Facing accusations of callousness and brutal indifference, the Trump administration managed to display a map that reinforced its critics’ worst fears.

Journalist and AIDS expert Emily Bass wrote on Substack, “The U.S. government’s failure to catch this error before displaying the slide at the top international AIDS conference in the world, in a session that featured the Director General of Nigeria as an invited guest, is not only disrespectful to African collaborators, it’s also a significant tell.”

But the Reuters report added that the image in question “contained an artificial intelligence watermark that ⁠signals it was made with OpenAI tools.”

The Trump administration’s recent track record on artificial intelligence can charitably be described as problematic. One of the first signs of trouble emerged last spring when the White House unveiled “The MAHA Report: Making Our Children Healthy Again,” which cited multiple scientific studies that did not exist after staffers misused AI.

In the following months, the serious missteps started to create a pattern. Border Patrol officials, for example, were caught misusing ChatGPT. The Food and Drug Administration unveiled an AI tool intended to speed up drug approvals, but the tool did not work. The then-director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, used an AI program to determine which documents to release about the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a process that apparently did not go well.

It’s tempting to think State Department officials would have recognized in these earlier examples the need to exercise greater caution. So much for that.

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