Photo Credit: Tools for Humanity
Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb startup announced a partnership with Bruno Mars to promote its new Concert Kit. But the partnership doesn’t exist.
Last week, OpenAI head Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb company, Tools for Humanity, announced a partnership with Bruno Mars to promote its new Concert Kit product. Designed to give “verified humans” a new way to purchase concert tickets, Concert Kit was to roll out on Bruno Mars’ Romantic Tour, according to the announcement. But Bruno Mars’ team and tour producer Live Nation both confirmed that such a partnership doesn’t exist—and Tools for Humanity never even approached them about the opportunity.
On April 17, Tools for Humanity (TFH) chief product officer Tiago Sada said during a company event in San Francisco that it would be joining Mars’ Romantic Tour to provide “VIP experiences for verified humans.” Afterward, the statement was reiterated in a post on the company’s website about Concert Kit’s launch.
“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.”
Now, that post has been edited to specify that Concert Kit will roll out on the 2027 European tour for Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.
“To be clear, we were never even approached by TFH, nor were we in any discussions regarding a partnership or tour access,” said Bruno Mars’ management and Live Nation in a joint statement. “We first learned that our tour was being used to promote their project after their keynote made those initial claims.”
Meanwhile, a TFH spokesperson also confirmed last week that the company “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.”
However, it’s still not clear why such a partnership was announced in the first place if Mars and his team had never even been approached about it. It’s not like when Sam Altman approached Scarlett Johannson about voicing its Chat-GPT offering codenamed Sky, then released the project with a different voice that sounded eerily similar to Johansson’s voice in the movie Her.
That said, there are plenty of reasons why Live Nation wouldn’t want to work with TFH, given that it hopes its Concert Kit will help combat ticket botting; the company has also taken swings at Live Nation-Ticketmaster in promotional material for the product. Even Anderson .Paak made a cameo at a Tools for Humanity event last year in favor of an investigation into Ticketmaster.
