In the immediate aftermath of the attack on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday night, influencers, pundits, and random posters lit up social media platforms like X, Bluesky, and Instagram with conspiracy theories about the attack and the alleged shooter.

Both left and right-wing accounts claimed, without evidence, that the attack was staged.

President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and dozens of other high-profile administration officials and journalists were attending the dinner at the Hilton hotel in Washington, DC, when a suspect, later identified by media reports as Cole Tomas Allen from California, allegedly ran past security towards the event. He was detained by law enforcement while the president and vice president were evacuated. Police said that they believe Cole acted alone, but did not expand on who his intended target was or what his motive may have been. “We believe the suspect was targeting administration officials,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning.

On Bluesky, which has a predominantly left-leaning user base, many people simply wrote the word “STAGED” over and over again, echoing the response to the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024.

On X, many claimed the shooting was staged as a way to bolster support for Trump’s plan to build a new ballroom in the White House. The president referenced the ballroom in a press conference after the incident and a Truth Social post on Sunday morning. Many prominent online Trump boosters echoed the need for the ballroom, including far-right podcaster Jack Posobiec, Libs of TikTok creator Chaya Raichik, and Tom Fitton, the right-wing activist who runs Judicial Watch.

Their quick response, conspiracy theorists claimed, was evidence of a coordinated campaign following the shooting. “Is this another staged event,” one X user asked in a post that has been viewed more than 5 million times.

Other social media users who claimed the incident was staged pointed to a Fox News clip that featured the station’s White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie speaking from the Hilton hotel. Hasnie told viewers that prior to the shooting, press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s husband allegedly told her “you need to be very safe,” before the call was cut off.

“Fox News just cut one of their reporters off as they seemed to indicate the shooting was a pre-planned false flag,” one X user wrote in a post that has been viewed more than 2 million times. Hasnie later clarified in an X post that her cell service had cut out in a location with notoriously bad service, adding: “He was telling me to be careful with my own safety because the world is crazy. He was expressing his concern for my safety.”

“I don’t want to be fomenting conspiracies,” wrote Angelo Carusone, the chair and president of Media Matters, on Bluesky about the Fox News interview. “But I mean…this was super weird. Super weird.”

Leavitt herself was also the focus of conspiracy theories after she said “shots will be fired” in an interview ahead of the dinner, referring to the jokes Trump was scheduled to deliver. Following the attack, X users claimed the comment was “strange,” “sus,” or a “curious choice of words,” while sharing memes that suggested the shooting was staged. At least one mainstream outlet appeared to amplify the conspiracy theory as well, describing Leavitt’s comment as “eerie” and “bizarre.”

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XChat, the standalone app for accessing X’s messaging feature, is available to download now for iOS. X first suggested it would be stripping direct messaging from X in 2025, but at least for now, XChat is available in the original X app, the web and this new app.

Based on its launch video, the new XChat app offers many of the elements of modern messaging X had already introduced to its chats feature, like the ability to delete and edit messages, block screenshots and send disappearing messages. The new XChat app also supports video and audio calls, and X claims that all messages sent with XChat are end-to-end encrypted.

XChat will also be expected to be the home of any groups that formed around X’s Communities feature. The social platform recently announced that it was retiring Communities at the end of May, and suggested that XChat’s support for larger group chats could be a worthwhile alternative. XChat’s group chats can currently have 350 participants, but X plans to expand that number in the future.

Elon Musk’s original pitch after he rebranded Twitter as X, was to turn the platform into an “everything app,” where things like an algorithmic feed, messaging, job boards and even payments could exist side-by-side. A standalone messaging app seems like the exact opposite of that, but it might also reflect where X finds itself in 2026. The company is now a subsidiary of xAI, and xAI itself is part of SpaceX. Musk’s push into AI appears to be the going concern, and cloning something like WeChat might just be less important.

Utility technology company Itron, Inc. has disclosed that an unauthorized third party accessed some of its internal systems during a cyberattack.

The company states that it activated its cybersecurity response plan when detecting the activity last month, notified law enforcement authorities, and engaged external advisors to support the investigation and incident containment.

“On April 13, 2026, Itron, Inc. was notified that an unauthorized third party had gained access to certain of its systems,” the company says says in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“The company activated its cybersecurity response plan and launched an investigation with the support of external advisors to assess, mitigate, remediate, and contain the unauthorized activity.”

The unauthorized activity has now been blocked, and the company stated that it has observed no follow-up activity.

Itron is a Washington-based public company that provides utility technology products and services for energy and water resources management.

The company is listed on NASDAQ, employs roughly 5,600 people, and in 2025 reported revenue of $2.4 billion. It serves 7,700 customers in 100 countries and manages 112 million endpoints.

Itron’s business is interwoven with critical infrastructure such as electricity grids, water distribution, and gas networks.

However, the company noted that in this case, business operations recorded no material disruption, and it does not currently expect any subsequent impact. Also, it expects a significant portion of incident-related costs to be covered by insurance.

Itron has also noted that the unauthorized activity did not extend to customers. However, it’s important to note that the investigation into the incident’s scope and impact is still ongoing.

No ransomware group has claimed the attack on Itron. BleepingComputer contacted Itron with a request for more details about the attack and will update this post once we hear back.

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The company also launched the latest iteration of its TPUs.

Google has made a series of new enterprise-focused launches, including a new platform to build and manage AI agents and the latest generation of its AI-specific Tensor Processing Units (TPU), as competition between tech giants targeting the lucrative enterprise sector continues to intensify.

The announcements were made at the company’s annual Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas yesterday (22 April), with around 32,000 in attendance.

There is no shortage of companies offering agentic AI services, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and China’s Alibaba, among more, with Google being the latest to join the enterprise AI race.

Parent company Alphabet has a planned spending of up to $185bn this year as it attempts to capitalise on the AI market.

To bolster its positioning, Google launched a new Gemini Enterprise Agent platform to build scale, govern, and optimise agents.

Users can manage aspects of the agents and deliver them through the company’s existing Gemini Enterprise platform, which saw a 40pc growth in paid monthly active users quarter-to-quarter in Q1.

The new launch is Google’s answer to Amazon’s Bedrock AgentCore and Microsoft Foundry.

The agent platform provides access to Gemini 3.1 Pro – Google’s most advanced model yet – the viral Nano Banana 2, audio model Lyria 3, and leading models from Anthropic, including Claude Opus, Sonnet, Haiku and Claude Opus 4.7.

Plus, a central monitoring unit lets users oversee and guide all agents from one location.

“The agentic enterprise is real – and deployed at a scale the world has never before seen,” said Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud’s CEO.

In a blogpost on the company’s site, CEO Sundar Pichai noted: “The conversation has gone from ‘Can we build an agent?’ to ‘How do we manage thousands of them?’”

Alongside this, Google is adding to its vertical stack offerings with a new cybersecurity platform that combines Google’s Threat Intelligence and Security Operations with Wiz’s cloud and AI security platform to detect and respond to threats.

Moreover, the company also launched the latest iteration of its TPUs, but this time, separating them into two distinct processors. Both chips will become available later this year.

TPU 8t will be used for “accelerated” training, while 8i will be used for “near-zero latency” inference, the company said.

These new systems are key components of Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, an integrated supercomputing architecture that combines hardware, software and networking to power the full AI life cycle, Google said.

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Jury selection begins Monday in Oakland federal court for the trial that will determine whether OpenAI’s conversion from a nonprofit to one of the most valuable companies in the world was a breach of charitable trust. Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and donated at least $38 million to it, is suing Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI on two remaining claims: unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust. He wants up to $150 billion in damages directed to the nonprofit arm, the ouster of Altman and Brockman from leadership, and a court order unwinding the for-profit conversion. On Friday, Musk voluntarily dropped his fraud and constructive fraud claims, narrowing the case from 26 claims to two but sharpening the focus on the question that has defined the dispute since it began: did OpenAI’s leadership promise a nonprofit and build a $852 billion company instead?

The evidence

The most damaging piece of evidence in the case is not an email from Sam Altman. It is a diary entry from Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s co-founder and president, written in 2017: “I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the case and who will make the final ruling on remedies if the jury finds liability, cited that entry directly in her January 15 ruling that sent the case to trial. She found “ample evidence” supporting Musk’s claims and rejected “nearly every attempt by OpenAI and Microsoft to make the lawsuit disappear.” The ruling was a 28-page signal that the court considers the case serious enough for a jury to hear, which in itself is a significant validation of the underlying allegations.

Musk’s legal team has also produced a 2017 email in which Altman claimed he remained “enthusiastic about the non-profit structure” after Musk threatened to cut off funding, a statement that Musk’s attorneys frame as a misrepresentation designed to keep donations flowing while leadership privately planned a different path. Hundreds of pages of discovery materials unsealed from depositions in the autumn of 2025 include emails, texts, and Slack messages that Musk’s team says show leadership “said one thing publicly and planned something completely different privately.” A February 2023 text from Altman to Musk, sent after Musk had publicly criticised OpenAI, read: “You’re my hero and that’s what it feels like when you attack OpenAI.” The witness list reads like a Silicon Valley tell-all: Musk, Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and Shivon Zilis.

The defence

OpenAI has called the lawsuit “baseless” and described it as a “harassment campaign that’s driven by ego, jealousy and a desire to slow down a competitor.” The competitor is xAI, the AI company Musk founded in 2023 and recently merged with SpaceX in an all-stock transaction valuing the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. Musk’s own AI venture was folded into SpaceX in a $1.25 trillion all-stock deal that raised its own corporate governance questions, a fact OpenAI’s defence team will use to argue that Musk’s motivations are competitive rather than charitable. OpenAI contends that Musk left the board in February 2018, reneged on a larger planned donation, and has no standing to dictate the organisation’s structure years after his departure. Judge Gonzalez Rogers herself noted that “this country likes competition,” flagging the potential self-interest in Musk’s claims.

The structural defence is that OpenAI’s conversion was reviewed by attorneys general in both California and Delaware, that the nonprofit entity now operates as the OpenAI Foundation holding approximately 26% of the company’s valuation, roughly $130 billion, and that the Foundation retains oversight of mission alignment and the ability to appoint members of the for-profit board. The $25 billion commitment the Foundation announced when OpenAI completed its recapitalisation makes it one of the most well-endowed philanthropic organisations in the world. OpenAI argues this structure preserves the charitable mission while enabling the scale of investment required to pursue artificial general intelligence. Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft have all denied wrongdoing.

The structure

The trial structure is unusual. The nine-member jury’s verdict on liability will be advisory only. Judge Gonzalez Rogers, not the jury, will make the final determination on both liability and remedies. Opening arguments are expected Tuesday. The liability phase runs through mid-May. If OpenAI is found liable, the remedies phase begins May 18, where the court will consider Musk’s requests for damages, the ouster of leadership, and the unwinding of the conversion. The advisory jury format means that even a unanimous jury verdict does not bind the judge, but a strong jury consensus would carry significant moral authority in the judge’s deliberations.

Musk’s decision to drop the fraud claims on Friday was strategic, not a concession. Fraud requires proving intentional deception, a higher evidentiary bar that would have diverted the trial into arguments about Altman’s state of mind. Unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust focus on outcomes rather than intent: did the conversion enrich insiders at the expense of the charitable mission, and did it violate the trust under which the nonprofit’s assets were held? These claims are easier to prove because the facts are largely undisputed. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. It converted to a for-profit. Its leaders hold equity in the for-profit entity. The question is whether that sequence constitutes a legal violation, not whether anyone intended it to be one. In his April 2026 amendment, Musk asked that Altman and Brockman be required to hand over “all equity and other personal financial benefits they obtained as a result of OpenAI’s for-profit operations” to the OpenAI charity.

The stakes

OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation is already facing scrutiny from its own investors over questions about its enterprise pivot and strategy shifts. The company raised $122 billion in its most recent round, is laying groundwork for a 2026 or 2027 IPO at a potential valuation of $1 trillion, and is projecting $14 billion in losses this year. The trial arrives at the worst possible moment for a company seeking public market credibility. At least 12 senior executives have left OpenAI since its conversion, with only two original co-founders remaining, a departure rate that includes the dismantling of OpenAI for Science and the shutdown of Sora, decisions that reinforce the argument that the conversion prioritised commercial revenue over the original research mission.

OpenAI quickly stepped in to fill Anthropic’s Pentagon contract with no usage restrictions after Anthropic refused the military work on principled grounds, a contrast that has become part of the broader governance debate about whether OpenAI’s “benefit all of humanity” charter survived the conversion. Eyes on OpenAI, a coalition of more than 60 California nonprofits, has separately argued that the restructuring deal is “full of holes” and could establish a precedent for startups to use nonprofit status for tax advantages before converting to for-profit. Public Citizen and the San Francisco Foundation have urged the California attorney general to ensure that conversion payments go to a new, independent charitable enterprise rather than one controlled by the same leadership that approved the conversion.

The trial is not only about OpenAI. It is about whether the nonprofit-to-profit conversion model is legally sustainable in AI. OpenAI was not the first technology organisation to start as a nonprofit and accumulate enormous value. Mozilla did. Wikipedia resisted. The question the Oakland courtroom will address over the next month is whether the people who built OpenAI with charitable donations and a stated commitment to benefit humanity can legally convert that work into an $852 billion for-profit enterprise and keep the equity. Musk says they cannot. Altman says the conversion serves the mission better than the original structure ever could. Brockman’s diary says it was a lie. The jury will hear all of it, and the judge will decide what it means.