Sam Altman’s Iris-Scanning Startup Falsely Announced Bruno Mars Tour Partnership, Organizers Confirm

Last week, Tools for Humanity—the eyeball-scanning identity startup co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—unveiled a new product called Concert Kit. Built to give confirmed, verified human users a way to purchase concert tickets, the tool was originally announced to debut first on Bruno Mars’ global tour for his latest studio album The Romantic.

But just days after the announcement, Bruno Mars’ management team and Live Nation, the lead producer of the Romantic Tour, issued a joint statement to WIRED on Tuesday shutting down the claim: the proposed partnership “does not exist,” and Tools for Humanity never even reached out to the tour organizers to discuss working together.

The confusion grew out of Tools for Humanity’s April 17 event in San Francisco, where the company’s chief product officer Tiago Sada told attendees that the startup would partner with the Romantic Tour to offer not just ticket access, but also “VIP experiences for verified humans.” That claim was later repeated in an official blog post published by the company, which noted: “Concert Kit launches today and will roll out during the Bruno Mars World Tour featuring DJ Pee .Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), where verified humans will have exclusive access to VIP suite experiences at select stops.”

Both the event footage and the original blog post have since been edited and re-released by Tools for Humanity. The company now says Concert Kit will instead launch on Thirty Seconds to Mars’ 2027 European tour, the band fronted by Jared Leto.

“To be clear, we were never approached by TFH, nor were we in any discussions regarding a partnership or tour access,” Bruno Mars’ Management and Live Nation said in their joint statement. “We first learned that our tour was being used to promote their project after their keynote made those initial claims.” WIRED originally included the Bruno Mars partnership claim in its initial coverage of the event, and has since updated its reporting to reflect the new clarification.

A spokesperson for Tools for Humanity confirmed to WIRED in a Wednesday statement that the startup “does not have any agreement with Bruno Mars to test or feature Concert Kit, and there is no association or affiliation with the artist or his tour.” The company declined to explain why it publicly named Bruno Mars as a partner for the new product in its initial announcement.

Tools for Humanity was co-founded in 2019 by Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania, with a core mission to use blockchain technology to verify human users online, where bots and scams are widespread. In 2023, the company launched a physical, iris-scanning device called the Orb that works alongside a mobile app to confirm user identities.

While Live Nation and Bruno Mars Management note they “have no opinions for or against their products,” there is underlying friction between Live Nation and the startup for separate reasons. Concert Kit is explicitly marketed as a solution to the chronic bot problem that plagues Ticketmaster, the ticketing giant owned by Live Nation. Back in September, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission was investigating Ticketmaster over whether the company had done enough to block bots from its platform.

Anderson .Paak, who tours with Bruno Mars under his DJ stage name DJ Pee .Wee, even made a guest appearance at Tools for Humanity’s San Francisco event to endorse the anti-bot mission, telling the crowd: “I fucking hate bots … they make everything really shitty. Especially for the fans.” That cameo only adds another layer to the confusion, as Paak is indeed scheduled to join Mars on the upcoming Romantic Tour.

Tools for Humanity also took a direct public jab at Ticketmaster in its original press release for Concert Kit, calling out the high-profile 2022 Eras Tour presale failure: “diehard Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour presale, where Ticketmaster faced 3.5 billion system requests in a single day, locking out millions of fans.”

The false Bruno Mars partnership announcement was one of several high-profile reveals at Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, which was designed to legitimize the startup’s identity-verification technology by pairing it with well-known major brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign all used the event to announce expanded work with Tools for Humanity.

For years, Tools for Humanity has struggled to win approval from governments worldwide for its technology as a safe, privacy-protective method to verify real human identities.