However, Romantic Tour producers Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation told WIRED in a joint statement on Tuesday that the partnership “does not exist” and that Tools for Humanity never contacted them about working together.
The confusion originated from the Tools for Humanity event on April 17 in San Francisco, where Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada said the company would be involved in romantic tours to provide not only access to tickets but also “VIP experiences for verified humans.”
The statement was reiterated in a blog post published by the company, which read: “The concert kit launches today and will be offered during the Bruno Mars World Tour featuring DJ P.V (aka Anderson .Paak), where verified humans will receive exclusive access to VIP suite experiences at select stops.”
A video of the event and the company’s blog post have been edited and re-shared by Tools for Humanity. Now they say the concert kit will be introduced on a 2027 European tour for Jared Leto’s band, Thirty Seconds to Mars.
“To be clear, we were never contacted by TFH, nor did we have any discussions regarding a partnership or tour access,” Bruno Mars management and Live Nation said in a joint statement to WIRED. “We first became aware that our tour was being used to promote their project when their keynote speaker made these initial claims.” (WIRED referenced the Bruno Mars partnership in its 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 on Wednesday that the startup “does not have any agreement with Bruno Mars to test or feature the concert kit, and has no connection or affiliation with the artist or his tour.” Tools for Humanity declined to explain why they announced Mars as a partner for the project in the first place.
Tools for Humanity was founded in 2019 by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman 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 say they have “no opinions for or against their products,” it is possible that Live Nation felt uneasy about Tools for Humanity for other reasons. The startup proposes that Concert Kit will help 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 over whether it took adequate steps to keep bots off its platform. Anderson .Paak made a cameo at a Tools for Humanity event to confirm this viewpoint, telling the crowd, “I hate bots… They make everything really crappy. Especially for the fans.” (Anderson.Paak, for what it’s worth, will soon be touring with Bruno Mars under his alias DJ PeeWee. The plot is intense.)
Tools for Humanity also took a dig at Ticketmaster in their press release for last week’s event, saying “Diehard Swifties will never forget the Eras Tour presale, 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 at Tools for Humanity’s Lift Off event, aimed at legitimizing the startup’s identity-verification technology by working with major brands. Executives from Tinder, Zoom and DocuSign said they would expand on their work with Tools for Humanity at the event. In the past, Tools for Humanity has struggled to get governments around the world on board with its technology as a secure, privacy-protecting way to identify actual humans.
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