Sam Altman’s eyeball examination set up, Tools for Humanityannounced last week that a new product called the Concert Kit—designed to give authorized humans a way to buy concert tickets—will debut on Bruno Mars’ world tour of his latest studio album, Romantic.
However, Bruno Mars Management and Long live the Nationproducer of Romantic Tour, told WIRED in a joint statement Tuesday that the partnership “doesn’t exist,” and that Tools for Humanity never even approached them about working together.
The confusion stemmed from an April 17 Humanity Instruments event in San Francisco, where chief product officer Tiago Sada said the company would join the Romantic Tour not only to offer ticket access but also a “VIP experience for verified humans.”
The statement was referenced in a blog post published by the company, which read: “The Festival Box will be launched today and will be launched during the Bruno Mars World Tour featuring DJ Pee .Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), where authorized people will have exclusive access to VIP events at special stations.”
Video of the event, and of the company blog postmodified and re-shared by Tools for Humanity. Now they say that the Concert Kit will debut 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 collaboration or tour access,” said Bruno Mars’ management and Live Nation in a joint statement to WIRED. “We learned for the first time that our visit was being used to promote their project after their major statement made the initial claims.” (WIRED had referenced Bruno Mars’ collaboration in his original story about the event; The story has been updated to include this new information.)
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 has no affiliation or affiliation with the artist or his tour.” Tools for Humanity declined to explain why they announced Mars as a partner in the project in the first place.
Humanity Tools was founded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania, with the goal of using blockchain technology to authenticate people in an online environment where fraud is rampant. In 2023, the company launched a physical, iris-scanning orb that works in conjunction with a mobile app.
Although Live Nation and Bruno Mars’ management say they “have no opinion for or against their product,” it’s possible that Live Nation feels bad about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup suggests that Concert Kit will help prevent 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 on whether it had done enough to keep the bot off its platform. Anderson .Paak appeared at the Tools for Humanity event to confirm this approach, telling the crowd, “I hate robots … they make everything so dirty. Especially for fans.” (Anderson .Paak, for what it’s worth, will soon tour with Bruno Mars under DJ Pee .Wee. This plan is getting serious.)
Tools for Humanity also blasted Ticketmaster in its press release for last week’s event, saying that “diehard Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour pre-sale, where Ticketmaster faced 3.5 billion system requests in one 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 identity verification technology by working with major brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign said they will be expanding their work using Humanity Tools at the event. Initially, Humanity Tools struggled to find governments around the world and its technology as a secure, privacy-protecting way to identify real humans.
