Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Startup Retracts False Bruno Mars Tour Partnership Claims After Teams Deny Any Collaboration

Just last week, Sam Altman’s iris-scanning startup Tools for Humanity (TFH) made a splashy public announcement for its new Concert Kit — a product pitched as an exclusive ticketing platform for identity-verified real humans — that the tool would make its public debut on Bruno Mars’ global tour supporting his latest studio album, The Romantic. But less than a week later, both Bruno Mars’ management team and the tour’s official producer Live Nation are outright refuting the claim, telling WIRED in a joint Tuesday statement that the supposed partnership “does not exist” and that TFH never even reached out to either party to discuss any kind of working arrangement.

The entire mix-up traces back to TFH’s April 17 launch event in San Francisco, where Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada told attendees the company would be embedded on The Romantic tour not just to give verified users access to tickets, but to deliver “VIP experiences for verified humans” as well. That claim was later reiterated in an official TFH blog post, 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.”

Following the pushback from Mars’ team and Live Nation, TFH has since edited both the public recording of its San Francisco event and its published blog post to rewrite the tour tie-in. The updated materials now claim Concert Kit will instead 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,” Bruno Mars’ Management and Live Nation wrote in their 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’s original event coverage had cited the stated Bruno Mars partnership, and the outlet has since updated the piece to reflect the corrected facts.)

A TFH spokesperson 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.” TFH has so far declined to explain why it initially named Mars and his active upcoming tour as a launch partner for the new product.

Founded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania, Tools for Humanity was built around the core goal of using blockchain technology to verify unique real humans in high-scam online environments. The company launched its iconic physical iris-scanning orb device paired with a companion mobile app back in 2023.

While Live Nation and Bruno Mars Management note they “have no opinions for or against their products,” the false announcement lands at a notably tense time for Live Nation, whose subsidiary Ticketmaster dominates the global major-event ticketing market. TFH explicitly pitches Concert Kit as a solution to the pervasive bot problem that has long plagued sites like Ticketmaster — a issue that drew federal regulatory scrutiny last September, when Bloomberg reported that the US Federal Trade Commission was investigating Ticketmaster over its failure to keep automated bot accounts off its platform.

The San Francisco event even featured a surprise cameo from Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to open for Bruno Mars on The Romantic tour under his DJ alias DJ Pee .Wee, who ranted to the crowd: “I fucking hate bots … they make everything really shitty. Especially for the fans.” TFH also took a public jab at Ticketmaster in its event press release, referencing the infamous Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale fiasco: “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 retracted Bruno Mars tie-in was one of many high-profile partnerships announced at TFH’s Lift Off event, which was explicitly staged to legitimize the startup’s identity-verifying technology via collaborations with major household-name brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign all appeared on site to announce expanded integration work with TFH’s tools. The announcement blitz comes after years of headwinds for the startup, which has struggled to convince governments across the world to adopt its iris-scanning system as a safe, privacy-protective official identity verification tool.