Tyler Shultz: The AI boom is “a great opportunity to go and deceive people”
Former Theranos employee and key whistleblower Tyler Shultz linked the current AI hype to his company’s history. The occasion was an interview with The San Francisco Standard and a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes’s final weeks before prison.
On October 30, 2026, TechCrunch retold Tyler Shultz’s interview with The San Francisco Standard. Shultz is a former Theranos employee and one of the key whistleblowers (whistleblower — an employee who publicly reported violations inside a company). His first job after college was at Theranos. In the interview, he said the current AI boom is “a great opportunity to go and deceive people.”
The occasion for the conversation was the documentary “You Can See Everything” about the final weeks of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes before prison. The directors are Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. According to the source, the film became one of the highest-grossing documentaries and prompted a nationwide discussion.
The Theranos story itself is known by the numbers: a peak valuation (valuation — the value of a company assigned by investors) of about $10 billion, while the technology never worked. The company’s own devices were used only for part of the tests; the rest were sent to third-party equipment. Some results reached Walgreens pharmacies and real patients. Holmes is currently serving a sentence in federal prison.
The difference in the current conversation is that it is not about a specific device with a verifiable output, but about companies that have not yet generated profit and at the same time attract capital at trillion-dollar valuations — that is how the source itself frames the context. A claim about the quality of a blood analysis could be checked with a repeat test. Checking a claim about the capabilities of a model or agent is harder and takes longer, and fewer documents usually reach public scrutiny.
Shultz said in the interview: “The only reason we are talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now is that she wants us to be talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now.” The film deliberately portrays her neither as a manipulator nor as a victim: the emphasis is on the ability to evoke pity even in people who know about her crimes.
What remained unknown: which companies, technologies, or sums Shultz means when he speaks about the risk of deception. In the published excerpt of the interview there are no concrete examples, and there is also no data on companies’ responses to his words.