April Fools’ Day 2026: The Good, the Bad and the Bizarre of This Year’s Corporate Jokes


If you’re online at all in 2026, you know it can feel like April Fools’ Day every day. You’ve almost certainly come across videos and content, often created with AI, and had to stop and ask yourself if what you’re looking at is true or made up. 

Some are obvious. You mean, there aren’t really beds made of kittens, cotton candy and rubies? And I wasn’t really offered a job guarding a spooky funeral home where I might hear tapping coming from the morgue freezer at 3 a.m.? (Both of these are TikTok videos, and the AI is scarily good — and also just scary.)

As brands roll out their April Fools’ Day jokes for this year, I keep thinking that in an AI-heavy world, the jokes seem less surprising, the faked-up art less novel. Here are some highlights from this year’s list of April 1 corporate and tech jokes.

T-Mobile cologne

Model holds a purple cell phone-shape that is presented as a cologne bottle

Can you smell me now? Wait, wrong cellphone company.

T-Mobile

Want to smell like your cellphone? What does that even mean? Wireless tech giant T-Mobile’s prank is Metro by T-Mobile CALLoGNE, combining call, as in phone call, with cologne. The company touts its April 1 joke as “the world’s first luxury fragrance inspired by the unmistakable scent of a brand-new phone.” Metro is T-Mobile’s prepaid brand, formerly known as MetroPCS. 

Timekettle British translation

They say the US and UK are two nations separated by a common language. You may already know some British phrases, including “boot” for what Americans call a car trunk, and “bonnet” for what we call the hood of a car. Timekettle makes AI-powered translation products, and its April 1 prank is a British-to-American language translation update for its translation devices. Cheerio, old chap.

british-translation-app-april-1

Timekettle offers translation services, but the British English to American English version is a special April 1 joke.

Timekettle

Whisker cat hair clothing

cataire.png

From couture to cat hair, Whisker’s April 1 prank involves cat-hair clothing.

Whisker

If you own a cat, cat hair is already on everything in your closet. So Cataire (like couture, I guess), a line of designer clothing made out of real cat hair, doesn’t seem that far off. Whisker, the company behind the Litter-Robot litter box, is taking this April 1 prank to the meowy max. They’ve actually used real cat hair from adoptable cats at a Michigan animal shelter to adorn five sweaters that will later be sold on eBay. Each eBay listing doubles as an adoption profile for a real shelter cat.

Yahoo’s Scrōll Stoppr

scrollstoppr-1

Doomscrolling isn’t even a possibility with Yahoo’s thumb guard, ScrōllStoppr.

Yahoo

Those who spend too much time on their phones might appreciate the idea behind Yahoo’s prank, Scrōll Stoppr. It’s described as “a delightfully absurd finger accessory that physically blocks your thumb from touching your phone screen.” I hate to break it to Yahoo, but I discovered this myself years ago when I cut my thumb slicing onions for Thanksgiving and had to wrap it in a Band-Aid. Yahoo says you can actually buy this — it will be available for $5 on Yahoo TikTok Shop on April 1 and will be delivered in a box that sounds off with the Yahoo signature yodel. If it sells out, just put on a Band-Aid for the same results. BYO yodel.

Omaha Steaks pocket steak

Man is shown pulling a pocket-sized Omaha steak package our of a denim shirt pocket.

Stake out a spot in your shirt for this pocket steak.

Omaha Steaks

Need a spot of protein on the go? Omaha Steaks is best known for sending giant crates of beef as gifts, but the company’s April 1 product is “the world’s first pocket-sized steak.” It gets beefier: The company jokes that the steak is cooked by motion-activated technology. A rare deal indeed, if well done.

Baskin-Robbins ice cream soup

br-soup.png

Slurp up Baskin-Robbins April Fools’ Day joke, ice-cream soup.

Baskin-Robbins

Baskin-Robbins has always had creative ice cream flavors, but for April 1, the company is hyping… ice cream soup. Not real, of course, but they’re promoting the faux frozen dessert in hopes that people will be inspired to take advantage of a buy-one-get-one 50% off deal on pre-packed quarts April 1-2 for Baskin-Robbins Rewards Members. Slurp ’em if you got ’em.

Baby Bottle Pop, supplement style

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Suck on this, say the makers of Baby Bottle Pop.

Baby Bottle Pop

Grown-ups don’t get any of the fun kid candy, but instead are stuck taking vitamins and supplements. Baby Bottle Pop Candy, which is exactly what it sounds like, candy in a baby-bottle container, is pretending for April 1 that it now comes in adult flavors. Is protein a flavor? Is fiber? Salmon is, but candy salmon is too much, even for this Seattleite. Thankfully, it’s just for April Fools’ Day.





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A new class-action lawsuit, filed on Monday by three teenage girls and their guardians, alleges that Elon Musk’s xAI created and distributed child sexual abuse material featuring their faces and likenesses with its Grok AI tech.

“Their lives have been shattered by the devastating loss of privacy, dignity, and personal safety that the production and dissemination of this CSAM have caused,” the filing says. “xAI’s financial gain through the increased use of its image- and video-making product came at their expense and well-being.”

From December to early January, Grok allowed many AI and X social media users to create AI-generated nonconsensual intimate images, sometimes known as deepfake porn. Reports estimate that Grok users made 4.4 million “undressed” or “nudified” images, 41% of the total number of images created, over a period of nine days. 

X, xAI and its safety and child safety divisions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The wave of “undressed” images stirred outrage around the world. The European Commission quickly launched an investigation, while Malaysia and Indonesia banned X within their borders. Some US government representatives called on Apple and Google to remove the app from their app stores for violating their policies, but no federal investigation into X or xAI has been opened. A similar, separate class-action lawsuit was filed (PDF) by a South Carolina woman in late January.

The dehumanizing trend highlighted just how capable modern AI image tools are at creating content that seems realistic. The new complaint compares Grok’s self-proclaimed “spicy AI” generation to the “dark arts” with its ease of subjecting children to “any pose, however sick, however fetishized, however unlawful.”

“To the viewer, the resulting video appears entirely real. For the child, her identifying features will now forever be attached to a video depicting her own child sexual abuse,” the complaint reads.

AI Atlas

The complaint says xAI is at fault because it did not employ industry-standard guardrails that would prevent abusers from making this content. It says xAI licensed use of its tech to third-party companies abroad, which sold subscriptions that led abusers to make child sexual abuse images featuring the faces and likenesses of the victims. The requests ran through xAI’s servers, which makes the company liable, the complaint argues.

The lawsuit was filed by three Jane Does, pseudonyms given to the teens to protect their identities. Jane Doe 1 was first alerted to the fact that abusive, AI-generated sexual material of her was circulating on the web by an anonymous Instagram message in early December. The filing says she was told about a Discord server by the anonymous Instagram user, where the material was shared. That led Jane Doe 1 and her family, and eventually law enforcement, to find and arrest one perpetrator.

Ongoing investigations led the families of Jane Does 2 and 3 to learn their children’s images had been transformed with xAI tech into abusive material.





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