Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning startup, Tools for Humanity, publicly announced a partnership with Bruno Mars to launch its new Concert Kit product — but Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation say the partnership “does not exist” and that the company never contacted them.
The false claim originated at a Tools for Humanity event on April 17, 2026, in San Francisco, where the company’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, said Concert Kit would roll out during Bruno Mars’ Romantic Tour, offering “VIP experiences for verified humans.” The announcement was also published in a company blog post. After the discrepancy became public, Tools for Humanity edited both the event video and the blog post to replace the Bruno Mars reference with a new claim: that Concert Kit will instead launch 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 said 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.”
A Tools for Humanity spokesperson confirmed to WIRED on 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.” The company declined to explain why Mars was announced as a partner in the first place.
Tools for Humanity was cofounded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania. The company uses blockchain technology to verify human identities in online environments, and in 2023 launched a physical iris-scanning orb paired with a mobile app. Concert Kit is designed to help verified humans purchase concert tickets and access VIP experiences, and the company used the product announcement to take aim at Ticketmaster — owned by Live Nation — citing the 3.5 billion system requests Ticketmaster faced during the Taylor Swift Eras Tour presale. Anderson .Paak, who appeared at the Tools for Humanity event, also criticized bots, saying they “make everything really shitty. Especially for the fans.”
The Bruno Mars announcement was part of a broader effort by Tools for Humanity to legitimize its identity-verification technology through brand partnerships. At the same April event, executives from Tinder, Zoom, and DocuSign said they would be expanding their work with the company. Tools for Humanity has previously faced difficulty convincing governments around the world to adopt its technology as a privacy-safe method of identifying real humans.
Source: WIRED