Sam Altman’s eyeball scan to start up, Tools for humanityannounced last week that a new product called Concert Kit, designed to give verified humans a way to purchase concert tickets, would be rolled out for the first time during Bruno Mars’ world tour with his latest studio album, The romantic.
However, Bruno Mars Management and Living Nationthe romantic tour’s producer, told WIRED in a joint statement Tuesday that the partnership “does not exist” and that Tools for Humanity never even approached them about working together.
The confusion came from an April 17 Tools for Humanity event in San Francisco, where chief product officer Tiago Sada said the company would join the Romantic Tour to not only provide ticket access 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 take place during Bruno Mars’ world tour with 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 blog posthave since been edited and re-shared by Tools for Humanity. They now say that Concert Kit will be deployed during the 2027 European tour of Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.
“To be clear, we have never been approached by TFH, nor participated in any discussions regarding partnership or access to the tour,” 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 opening speech made these initial statements.” (WIRED had referred to the partnership with Bruno Mars in its original story about the event; the story has since been updated to include this new information.)
A Tools for Humanity spokesperson confirmed to WIRED in a statement Wednesday that the startup “does not have any agreement with Bruno Mars to test or present 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 on the project in the first place.
Tools for Humanity was co-founded in 2019 by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, 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 Live Nation and Bruno Mars Management state that they “have no opinions for or against their products,” it’s possible that Live Nation feels irritated about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup proposes that Concert Kit helps 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 wondering if he had done enough to keep the robots off his platform. Anderson .Paak made an appearance at the Tools for Humanity event to vouch for this approach, telling the crowd, “I fucking hate robots…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 DJ Pee .Wee moniker. The plot thickens.)
Tools for Humanity also criticized Ticketmaster in its press release for last week’s event, saying “die-hard Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour pre-sale, where Ticketmaster faced 3.5 billion system requests in a single day, locking out millions of fans.”
The partnership with Mars was one of several announced during Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, which aimed 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 convince governments around the world to adopt its technology as a secure, privacy-friendly way to identify real humans.