Scanning Sam Altman’s eyeballs startup Tools for Humanity announced last week that a fresh product called Concert Kit – designed to allow verified people to purchase concert tickets – will be first introduced during Bruno Mars’ world tour in support of his latest studio album, Romantic.
However, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation, the producer of the romantic tour, told WIRED in a joint statement on Tuesday that the partnership “does not exist” and that Tools for Humanity never even contacted them about collaborating.
The confusion stemmed from the April 17 Tools for Humanity event in San Francisco, where chief product officer Tiago Sada said the company would join Romantic Tour not only to provide access to tickets but also “VIP experiences for verified people.”
The statement was repeated in a blog post published by the company, which read: “The live set premieres today and will be made available during Bruno Mars’ world tour with DJ Pee .Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), during which verified people will have exclusive access to VIP suites at select stops.”
Video from the event and company blog entryhave already been edited and shared by Tools for Humanity. They now say that the Concert Kit will appear on the 2027 European tour of Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.
“To be clear, we have never been approached by TFH nor have we had any discussions regarding a partnership or tour access,” Bruno Mars and Live Nation management said in a joint statement to WIRED. “We first learned that our tour was being used to promote their project after their speech made opening statements.” (WIRED mentioned the Bruno Mars partnership in its original story about the event; the story has since been updated to include this fresh information.)
A spokesperson for Tools for Humanity confirmed to WIRED in a statement Wednesday that the startup “does not have any contract with Bruno Mars to test or provide the Concert Kit and has no affiliation or affiliation with the artist or his tour.” Tools for Humanity did not explain why it even announced Mars as a project partner.
Tools for Humanity was founded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and German entrepreneur Alex Blania to utilize blockchain technology to verify people in online environments where fraud is common. In 2023, the company released a physical iris-scanning ball that works with a mobile application.
Although Live Nation management and Bruno Mars say they have “no opinion for or against their products,” it’s possible that Live Nation is concerned about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup proposes that Concert Kit will facilitate thwart the bot problem that plagues sites like Ticketmaster – owned by Live Nation.
In September, Bloomberg reported that The US Federal Trade Commission investigated Ticketmaster on whether it has done enough to keep bots off its platform. Anderson .Paak made a cameo appearance at the Tools for Humanity event to vouch for this approach, telling the audience, “I fucking hate bots… they make everything really shitty. Especially for the fans.” (Anderson .Paak, for what it’s worth, will soon be on tour with Bruno Mars under the name DJ Pee .Wee. The plot thickens.)
Tools for Humanity also reacted sharply to Ticketmaster in its press release regarding last week’s event, stating that “diehard Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour pre-sale, during which Ticketmaster received 3.5 billion system requests in a single day, locking out millions of fans.”
The partnership with Mars was one of many announced during Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, which aimed to legitimize the startup’s identity verification technology through partnerships with major brands. During the event, executives from Tinder, Zoom and Docusign announced they would expand their partnerships with Tools for Humanity. In the past, Tools for Humanity has had difficulty convincing governments around the world to embrace its technology as a sheltered and privacy-preserving way to identify real people.