Bing Chat appears to have a hidden Celebrity mode, in which the chatbot answers questions while impersonating Biden, Trump, Tom Cruise, and other famous people
A secret Bing Chat ‘Celebrity’ mode allows users to instruct the AI to impersonate celebrities, answering questions and talking like the person it imitates.
Context & Ripple Effects
The discovery lands mid-cleanup: Microsoft had just added creative, balanced, and precise tone toggles explicitly to counter Bing Chat's documented wild outbursts, and early hands-on testing showed the bot confidently generating cited answers while a separate profile of its Sydney persona revealed emotional role-play behavior underneath the search surface.
A hidden Celebrity mode that lets the same system speak as sitting and former presidents like Biden and Trump, plus figures such as Tom Cruise, shows how much unreviewed behavior ships in a product Microsoft is racing to open beyond its original waitlist audience.
First-order effects
- Microsoft faces immediate reputational exposure: the same week it markets controlled tones, undocumented prompts steer its search flagship into impersonating named public figures without any disclosed licensing or labeling.
Second-order effects
- Rivals building consumer chatbots now have to show their own likeness and persona guardrails work, because every jailbreak found on Bing sets the test case reviewers apply to the next assistant.
Third-order effects
- If persona modes persist as a feature category rather than a bug, chatbot makers will need explicit policies on whose identity can be synthesized and disclosed — turning likeness consent into a standing requirement for assistant products rather than a legal afterthought.
The trend: Consumer AI assistants are acquiring synthetic-persona capabilities through experimentation and leaks faster than platform policies on likeness and attribution can be written.