In early July 2025, videos circulated (archived) online claiming to authentically show a dolphin saving a snow leopard lost at sea.
One version of the video that had 20 million views at the time of this writing was titled, "Spotted a Dolphin Carrying a Lost Snow Leopard in the Frozen Seas!"
The video showed what appeared to be a large dolphin carrying a snow leopard cub through a frozen sea. In a series of short scenes, rescuers on a boat pulled the snow leopard and dolphin on board, bathed the cub and cleaned the dolphin of what appeared to be barnacles before sending it back to sea.
At least two different versions that showed the same narrative using slightly different footage circulated on YouTube (archived), Facebook (archived), Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived).
However, both videos we saw that portrayed the same unlikely narrative were marked as "Altered or synthetic content" on YouTube, indicating that someone generated them using artificial intelligence (AI). The channel sharing the most popular of the videos was called "Teddy Gen AI" — a reference to generative AI, which can create new content from a prompt. Therefore, we rate this footage fake.
The two popular videos showing the alleged encounter depicted different-sized snow leopard cubs and different dolphins, seemingly suggesting the unlikely event happened twice. The videos' upload dates, May 29 and June 19, 2025, were weeks apart.
Though some dolphins do live in Arctic or Antarctic waters, snow leopards do not live near the sea, meaning it was unlikely the two species would meet in reality.
This was not the first piece of AI-generated content involving aquatic life Snopes has investigated. Previously, we've looked into claims that images showed a real giant axolotl-like creature Papuan fishermen pulled from the ocean and that a video authentically showed a big-eyed jellyfish.