AI images falsely tie press gala shooting suspect to Guthrie, others
- Published on April 29, 2026 at 23:02
- 4 min read
- By AFP USA
Images purporting to show the man charged with trying to assassinate US President Donald Trump during the White House Correspondents' Association dinner are swirling online, depicting him with multiple public figures including NBC News anchor Savannah Guthrie, whose mother went missing in early 2026. But AFP found no evidence to link Guthrie and suspect Cole Tomas Allen, and the widespread visual of the two was generated with artificial intelligence.
"BREAKING: The shooter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner has been identified as 30-year-old Cole Allen from Torrance, California. Cole is a former driver for Savannah Guthrie and his wife is currently working as her assistant," says an April 27, 2026 post sharing the image on Facebook.
The image appeared days after an alleged assassination attempt forced evacuations of Trump and other members of his administration from the April 25 media gala in Washington. Similar posts spread across X and Facebook.
"Did Cole Allen have something to do with the kidnapping of Savannah Guthrie's mother?" another post on X asks.
Suspect Cole Tomas Allen, 31, was arraigned April 27 on charges of trying to assassinate Trump and two firearms crimes. He faces a sentence of up to life in prison if convicted of attempting to kill the Republican president.
Guthrie of NBC News is one of US television's most recognizable faces and has hosted the "Today" show since 2012.
In a dramatic missing person case that puzzled investigators, Guthrie's 84-year-old mother disappeared from her home in Arizona in the early hours of February 1. Security camera footage released by authorities shows a masked, apparently armed man at her house around the time of her disappearance.
But the image portraying Allen and Guthrie together is an AI-generated fake. No evidence connecting the two exists.
From Vance to Guthrie
AFP did not find any authentic visual matches for the image.
Google's SynthID detection tool identified a SynthID -- an invisible watermark the company says is attached to AI-generated content created using its programs -- in the image (archived here).
Hive Moderation, another tool designed to detect AI imagery, similarly assessed that the image "is likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content" attributing the result to Google's Gemini AI tool.
The rendering appears to be based on a picture from a tutoring company's post recognizing Allen as "teacher of the month" in December 2024, in which he wore the same sweater depicted in the AI-generated fake.
Guthrie reportedly lives in a Brooklyn Heights, New York townhouse and the "Today" show is filmed almost daily at the NBC studios in the same city at 2 Rockefeller Plaza (archived here, here and here).
There are no reports of Allen ever living in the state of New York.
His academic and professional experiences place him on the US west coast, according to a LinkedIn profile matching his name and photo (archived here and here).
AFP reached out to Guthrie's publicist about the image circulating online, but a response was not forthcoming.
In addition to Guthrie, an AFP investigation found more than 50 public figures falsely associated with Allen through AI images, including actor Tom Hanks, actress Sydney Sweeney and musician Chris Brown.
The posts describe Allen, often portrayed in the same clothes but posing with different celebrities, as a "former driver," "assistant" or "production crew member" for the stars, but AFP found no evidence backing those claims.
Other posts falsely claimed Allen had been on the staff of over 40 different professional and collegiate sports teams, with AI-generated visuals dressing him in gear for teams across multiple leagues.
Many of the articles accompanying the fabricated images -- linked in comments under the posts -- carry nearly identical storylines and use unnatural English phrasing and homoglyphs, all pointing to the deployment of artificial intelligence.
"The reason why these websites use homoglyphs on their text is to avoid being detected as having been AI-written and also to bypass automatic fake news detectors," Aldan Creo, who researches large language models at the University of California, San Diego, told AFP for a previous investigation (archived here).
In an April 29 email to AFP, a Meta spokesperson said "it is reprehensible when opportunists seek to exploit moments of tragedy." The company said it had begun removing posts it found violated its policies.
AFP also reported on conspiracy theories claiming Trump "staged" the incident and investigated false claims seeking to tie Allen to Second Lady Usha Vance.
Read more of AFP's fact-checks on US politics here.
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