LONG ISLAND — FBI Director Kash Patel posted a promotional video on X on Monday that appears to use AI-generated recreations of shots from the Beastie Boys' 1994 music video "Sabotage." The roughly two-minute video accompanied a post about the FBI's effort to combat what Patel called "massive fraud" and had received roughly half a million views by Tuesday.

The video used the instrumental version of "Sabotage" and footage nearly identical to the original music video, directed by Spike Jonze, interspersed with what appeared to be authentic footage of FBI agents conducting their work. An analysis identified at least six clips that were frame-by-frame recreations of shots from the original music video.

Several visual anomalies in the FBI video point to AI generation. In one shot of a car spinning out, grilles visible in some of the windows in the original footage are missing. In another, an individual with a megaphone jumps from roof to roof with telephone lines in the background, and the lines and dirt on the building align identically to the 1994 video. In one frame, a telephone line appears to pass through the head of a character. A still shows the driver's arm appearing shrunken, with both the red and green lights lit on a stoplight.

Independent experts who reviewed the video agreed the clips were likely generated by AI. "It does seem like it would be highly likely to be AI. You can even see some of the AI errors," said Kolina Koltai, a researcher with the online investigations group Bellingcat. Koltai pointed to a moment of characteristic AI-generated artifacts on the "No Fraud" license plate on the FBI car in the opening shot.

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, offered a technical explanation for how the footage may have been produced. "The clips were likely created by taking screenshots or short clips from the original 'Sabotage' music video and feeding them into an image-to-video model," he said. "It's also possible that the AI model generated the video clips itself because the original music video was in its training data — though that's less likely."

AI-generated content has appeared in other messaging from President Trump's administration. In October, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself dumping brown fluid on protestors at a "No Kings" rally set to "Danger Zone" by Kenny Loggins. Loggins demanded that the video be taken down, but it remains on Trump's Truth Social account. In January, the White House posted an AI-doctored image of a protestor in Minneapolis who had been arrested by federal authorities, without labeling that the image had been manipulated.