State department ‘takes full responsibility’ for erroneous, widely shared chart displayed at Aids conference in Brazil
A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a state department presentation at a global conference in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attenders 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.
A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The state department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide deck before the event.
The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent.
Screenshots of the map first appeared in a Substack post by the Aids expert Emily Bass and were widely shared on LinkedIn, with one post garnering about 40,000 views.
“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.
In a statement, the state department said: “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our <a href="https://absafricatv.com/mofa-to-protest-south-african-eta-system-designation/" title="MOFA to protest South African ETA system designation”>African partners.” The speaker at the conference was Jeff Graham, the top US health envoy who oversees the initiative known as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar. He did not reply to requests for comment.
The state department said the discussions at the conference were “substantive and constructive” despite the map and that it remained committed to fighting Aids with real results. The Trump administration’s decision last year to pause funding pending a review disrupted aid programs worldwide but Pepfar’s core work such as the provision of life-saving drugs has largely resumed. The US is scaling back other areas of its spending including on prevention and surveillance, and plans to fully phase out the program in South Africa.
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