Sam Altman’s Orb Company Promoted a Bruno Mars Partnership That Doesn't Exist

Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning startup, Tools for Humanity, announced last week that a new product called Concert Kit—designed to give verified humans a way to purchase concert tickets—would first roll out on Bruno Mars’ world tour of his latest studio album, The Romantic.

However, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation, the producer for the Romantic Tour, told WIRED in a joint statement on Tuesday that the partnership “does not exist,” and that Tools for Humanity never even approached them about working together.

The confusion stemmed from a Tools for Humanity event April 17 in San Francisco, where chief product officer Tiago Sada said the company would be joining the Romantic Tour to not just provide access to tickets but also “VIP experiences for verified humans.”

The statement was reiterated in a blog post published by the company, which read: “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.”

A video of the event, and the company’s blog post, have since been edited and reshared by Tools for Humanity. They now say that Concert Kit will roll out on the 2027 European tour for Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.

“To be clear, we were never approached by TFH, nor were we in any discussions regarding a partnership or tour access,” said Bruno Mars’ Management and Maya Sarin, a spokesperson for Live Nation, in a joint statement to WIRED. “We first learned that our tour was being used to promote their project after their keynote made those initial claims.” (WIRED had referenced the Bruno Mars partnership in its original story about the event; the story has since been updated to include this new information.)

Jess Montejano, a spokesperson for Tools for Humanity, confirmed to WIRED in a statement Wednesday 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.” Tools for Humanity declined to explain why they announced Mars as a partner for the project in the first place.

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

While Sarin says that Live Nation and Bruno Mars Management “have no opinions for or against their products,” it’s possible that Live Nation is feeling prickly about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup is proposing that Concert Kit will help thwart the bot problem that plagues sites like Ticketmaster—which is owned by Live Nation.

In September, Bloomberg reported that the US Federal Trade Commission was investigating Ticketmaster over whether it had done enough to keep bots off its platform. Anderson .Paak made a cameo at the Tools for Humanity event to vouch for this approach, saying to the crowd, “I fucking hate bots … they make everything really shitty. Especially for the fans.” (Anderson .Paak, for what it’s worth, will soon be touring with Bruno Mars under his moniker DJ Pee .Wee. The plot thickens.)

Tools for Humanity also took a jab at Ticketmaster in its press release for last week’s event, saying that “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 partnership with Mars was one of many announced at Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, which aimed to legitimize the startup’s identity-verifying technology by working with major brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign said they’d be expanding their work with Tools for Humanity at the event. In the past, Tools for Humanity has struggled to get governments around the world on board with its technology as a safe, privacy-protecting way to identify real humans.