Apple’s Dictation App Is Mistaking the Word ‘Racist’ for ‘Trump’

A recently discovered bug in iPhone’s dictation app caused it to swap out the word “Trump” for “racist,” in a development that is sure to have liberals chortling and conservatives fuming.

The issue was first noted by users of TikTok and other social media sites, who found that when they said the word “racist,” the app would instead briefly deliver the name of our current president, as Variety first reported. Apple has since confirmed that its app does sometimes confuse one word with another. “We are aware of an issue with the speech recognition model that powers Dictation and we are rolling out a fix today,” an Apple representative told Variety.

How does Apple explain this bizarre mixup? The company has claimed that its speech-recognition feature “may temporarily display words with some phonetic overlap before landing on the correct word.” Theoretically, that makes sense but I think it’s somewhat questionable how much Trump’s name and “racist” have in common phonetically. Variety claims that its own tests “indicate that other words that can produce ‘trump’ include ‘ramp,’ ‘rhubarb,’ ‘rhythmic’ and ‘ruffles.’” A broad overall takeaway could just be that Apple’s dictation app sucks. Notably, Apple has been gradually integrating AI with its products.

SHOCKING iPhone betrayal: Say ‘racist,’ see ‘TRUMP’ pop up!

This was an accident, right? pic.twitter.com/zXbFsgsPVM

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 25, 2025

One TikTok influencer account noted that she had been able to reproduce the bug at least twice, and provided a video of the transcription jumping from “Trump” to “racist.” “How do they do that? That’s scary,” she says, in the video.

Gizmodo reached out to Apple for comment and more information on the bug.

This is sure to do little to assuage concerns by conservatives that Big Tech is out to get them. Even though—since the election—the tech industry has overwhelmingly stepped up to kiss Trump’s ass, conservatives have long suspected that the tech oligarchy is not on their side. For the most part, tech’s perceived slights against the MAGA world have been palpable, if notably small fry. Previous scandals involved an election-related incident last summer when Amazon Alexa was caught encouraging voters to vote for Kamala Harris but couldn’t give similar reasons for Trump, and Google’s much-maligned AI image generator, which kicked off the whole “Black vikings” debacle.