An AI Web Search Tool Just Turned Up NSFW Overwatch Results

Somewhere between checking Juno’s hero page and working out Mercy’s healing per second, an AI web search turned up two results titled “mercy overwatch porn”, and both were hosted on university websites. The screenshot comes from a Reddit user who asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, a perfectly innocent question about Overwatch Stadium healers, then posted the outcome to r/ClaudeAI this week.

The thread has passed 380 upvotes, and r/ClaudeAI handled it with all the dignity you’d expect. The top reply, which has even more upvotes than the post itself, simply reads “AGI”, the shorthand for artificial general intelligence, the human-level AI the industry keeps promising is just around the corner. The replies underneath quickly joke over what AGI really stands for, “Artificial Goooning Intelligence”.

The Prompt That Started It

The poster, who said it was the first thing they had ever posted on Reddit, was using Claude’s Opus 5.5 model. This is the full prompt they gave it:

Can you work out what healer and paired perks gives the most healing in overwatch stadium? I want you to find the most up-to-date information and calculate your workings with what other people have said. I also give me the information for brigitte and mercy as well as the person who heals the most constantly and also the person who heals the most in bursts. Also tell me any other very good healers for other situations.

Nothing in there asks for anything beyond healing numbers, which is what makes the result so strange. The two explicit entries came from smi.engin.umich.edu, a University of Michigan subdomain, and cuentame.coe.arizona.edu, at the University of Arizona.

The poster admitted they probably should have told Claude to stick to reliable sources, but still asked the obvious question: “Why is this even something claude can search up,” arguing the word should have been flagged and skipped.

What the Search Log Actually Shows

Here’s the twist that takes the air out of the joke. The list under “Searched the web” is not a record of what Claude typed. It shows the titles and domains of the pages a search returned, and the rest of the same list proves it. Next to the two university entries sit “Just for context, these are Mercy’s perks:”, which is the opening line of a Blizzard forums post, an MCV/Develop headline about Mercy’s rework going live after a month on the private test realm, and TechRadar’s Mercy guide to lore, abilities, and gameplay. Nobody types the first line of a forum post into a search bar.

So Claude searched for something about Mercy’s Stadium perks, and the search engine handed back a mix of Blizzard pages, hero guides, and two titles nobody asked for. One commenter spelled this out in the thread, noting that the log lists result titles rather than the query, and that the separate “Fetched” entries are where Claude actually opens a page.

The log has its share of quirks, including one status line that briefly switched to Italian to verify Juno’s current abilities. But nothing visible shows Claude opening either university page. Earlier steps show it fetching Blizzard’s Juno hero page and checking Ana’s and Kiriko’s Stadium abilities, and the step straight after the explicit results reads “Figuring out Mercy’s healing rate per second”. Whatever the search engine served up, Claude went back to doing the maths.

Why University Websites Turn Up in Results Like These

The replies had plenty of fun with the .edu addresses, with one commenter joking that university websites are the wrong place to go looking for that sort of thing. But the pattern isn’t a one-off. Another user said Claude had shown them similar results from Stanford and UCLA.

Nobody has confirmed what’s actually on those two pages, but there are a few likely explanations:

• A hacked page: universities run hundreds of small department and project sites, and plenty get forgotten and never updated. Spammers break into these and fill them with junk pages, because Google tends to trust anything ending in .edu and ranks it higher.
• Spam slipped in through the back door: some university sites let people upload files, post comments, or run searches that create new pages. Spammers abuse those features to get their own pages living on a university address, no hacking required.
• Actual research: universities do study porn, fandoms, and online communities, so a paper or project page containing those words isn’t impossible.

The research option is the least likely of the three. Both pages carry the exact same three-word title, which is how spam pages are named, not academic papers, and the two universities have nothing to do with each other.

Either way, the poster’s question about why it wasn’t filtered out still stands, and the thread never got an answer to it.