Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz warns that the AI boom is ‘a great opportunity to go deceive people’

Theranos whistleblower Tyler Shultz has warned that the AI investment boom could make it easier for founders to deceive investors because technical due diligence is difficult. Shultz, who helped expose Theranos’ inaccurate blood-testing devices after joining the company out of college, said investors must recognize the power they give founders when providing large sums of money. He criticized a funding culture in which a short meeting can lead to a $100,000 investment, saying Elizabeth Holmes scaled that model to $100 million. Theranos reached a valuation of about $10 billion despite technology that never worked as promised. Its devices delivered faulty results to patients through Walgreens, while the company performed only a fraction of tests on its own machines and outsourced others to third-party equipment. Theranos frequently raised money from individual investors, including the DeVos and Walton families, and withheld scientific evidence from prospective investors by citing trade-secret concerns. Shultz said AI makes it hard to distinguish genuinely novel technology from a “ChatGPT wrapper,” creating what he called a significant opportunity for deception. Holmes is serving a federal prison sentence of more than 11 years. A documentary, “You Can See Everything,” depicts her final weeks before imprisonment and shows Holmes and partner Billy Evans working on Haemanthus, a diagnostics company they call “Theranos 2.0” that has reportedly raised about $20 million.