Albert Saniger, CEO of the startup Nate, has been indicted by the American justice system for financial fraud. His fault: he is accused of having deceived investors by exaggerating the AI capabilities of his e-commerce application, and that's an understatement! His technology promised to simplify online shopping with the help of artificial intelligence capable of finalizing an order with a single click.
Nate's Deception
A dream for e-commerce sites, and a relief for compulsive consumers who are fed up with the final stages of an order that can fall through at any moment. Founded in 2018, Nate has raised over $50 million in funding (including $38 million in 2021). In his investor communication, Albert Saniger touts a proprietary AI designed to automatically execute purchases for users.
Except that this famous AI would be none other than human teams based in the Philippines, who complete transactions manually, in the traditional way, pretending to be robots!
According to the indictment by the US Department of Justice, Albert Saniger would have willfully concealed the lack of automation by locking down access to internal data and citing "trade secrets" to justify its opacity. Nate did, however, begin developing his own bots in 2021, but these represented only a tiny part of the process, which still remained largely dependent on human labor.
The judge in charge of the case denounces a fraud that "harms real innovations in AI" by diverting funding to deceptive projects. The FBI, for its part, cites a carefully orchestrated "technological illusion." This could cost the CEO, a Spanish citizen living in Barcelona, dearly. The charges—stock market fraud and wire fraud—are punishable by up to 20 years in prison each.
Source: DoJ
0 Comments