Sam Altman’s Orb promoted a non-existent Bruno Mars partnership

Eyeball Scan by Sam Altman start, Tools for humanityannounced last week that a new product called Concert Kit — designed to give verified humans a way to purchase concert tickets — will debut on Bruno Mars’ world tour for his latest studio album, Romantic.

However, Bruno Mars’ management Long live the nationproducer of the Romance tour, told WIRED in a joint statement on Tuesday that the partnership “doesn’t exist,” and that Tools for Humanity never approached them about working together.

The confusion stemmed from an April 17 Tools for Humanity event in San Francisco, where chief product officer Thiago Sada said the company would join the romance tour to not only provide access to tickets but also “VIP experiences for verified people.”

The statement was confirmed in a blog post published by the company, which reads: “The concert set launches today and will be rolled out during Bruno Mars’ world tour featuring DJ Pee .Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), where verified humans will have exclusive access to VIP set experiences at select stops.”

Video of the event and the company Blog posthas since been edited and reshared by Tools for Humanity. They now say the concert set will be released on the 2027 European tour of Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.

“To be clear, we have never been contacted by TFH, nor have we been in any discussions regarding a partnership or access to the tours,” Bruno Mars management and Maya Sarin, a Live Nation spokesperson, told WIRED in a joint statement. “We first learned that our tour was being used to promote their project after their keynote made those initial claims.” (WIRED referenced the Bruno Mars partnership in its report Original story About the event; The story has since been updated to include this new information.)

Jess Montegano, a spokesperson for Tools for Humanity, confirmed to WIRED in a statement on Wednesday that the startup “does not have any agreement with Bruno Mars to test or demo the concert set, and there is no association or affiliation with the artist or his tour.” Tools for Humanity declined to explain why it announced Mars as a partner for the project in the first place.

Tools for Humanity was founded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania, with the goal of using blockchain technology to verify people in online environments where scams are common. In 2023, the company launched a physical iris-scanning orbiter that works in conjunction with a mobile app.

While Sarin says Live Nation and Bruno Mars Management “have no opinions for or against their products,” Live Nation is likely concerned about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup suggests Concert Kit could help thwart the bot problem plaguing sites like Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation.

In September, Bloomberg reported that The US Federal Trade Commission was investigating Ticketmaster About whether it has done enough to keep bots off its platform. Anderson .Paak appeared at a Tools for Humanity event to attest to this approach, telling the audience: “I hate robots… They make everything really bad. Especially for the fans.” (Anderson .Paak, for what it’s worth, will soon be touring with Bruno Mars under his moniker DJ Pee .Wee. And the plot thickens.)

Tools for Humanity also took a jab from Ticketmaster in its press release for last week’s event, saying that “hardcore Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour preview, where Ticketmaster faced 3.5 billion system requests in one day, locking out millions of fans.”

The partnership with Mars was one of several announced at Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, which aims to legitimize the startup’s identity verification technology by working with major brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom and Docusign said they would expand their work with Tools for Humanity at the event. In the past, Tools for Humanity has struggled to get governments around the world to use its technology as a secure, privacy-protecting way to identify real humans.