Theranos Whistleblower Tyler Shultz Warns AI Is 'a Great Opportunity to Go Deceive People'

Tyler Shultz, the whistleblower who exposed Theranos' dangerously inaccurate blood testing devices, says the AI boom offers fraudsters an unprecedented opening: "If you want to deceive people, I think this is a great opportunity to go deceive people."

He made the comment in an interview with The San Francisco Standard, timed to the release of "You Can See Everything," the documentary about disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes that has become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time. The film, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, follows Holmes during her final weeks of freedom before she began serving a federal prison sentence of more than eleven years.

Shultz knows the Theranos story from the inside. His first job out of college was at the company. He became a key whistleblower after its devices — which had made their way into Walgreens stores and delivered faulty results to real patients — turned out to be unreliable. Theranos reached a peak valuation of around $10 billion despite its technology never actually working. The company used its own machines for only a fraction of its tests and quietly outsourced the rest to third-party equipment.

His warning lands at a moment when AI companies that have never turned a profit are raising capital at trillion-dollar valuations. That is the stake: the same investor dynamics that let Theranos soar — charisma, secrecy, fear of missing out — now operate in a field where the technology itself is far harder to verify.

Why does Shultz see Theranos repeating in the AI era?

The core problem, Shultz argues, is that due diligence on AI is fundamentally difficult. "A huge danger with AI is that I think it is really hard to do due diligence on it," he told the Standard. "It's really hard to tell the difference between what is something truly unique and new versus like, a ChatGPT wrapper."

That distinction matters. A blood test can, in principle, be validated against known samples. A claimed AI breakthrough can be demoed, staged, or wrapped around someone else's model, and an investor without deep technical expertise may struggle to tell the difference. Shultz's fear is that the investors who swore lessons learned after Theranos collapsed will forget them in the rush to fund the next platform shift.

"I think the days of having a thirty-minute coffee with someone and sending them $100,000 should be over," Shultz said. "Elizabeth took that model and scaled it to $100 million."

He frames Theranos' fundraising in unusually blunt terms. "I believe that what [Holmes] did was raise the biggest angel round of funding of all time," he said, "but even at the smaller levels, I think investors need to recognize that when they put that type of money in someone's hands, they are giving them tremendous power."

Who funded Theranos — and why it matters now?

The structure of Theranos' funding is a central part of the cautionary tale. Much of the money came not from venture firms but from individual investors — including the DeVos and Walton families. Top Silicon Valley venture capitalists were largely warded off, because Theranos refused to share scientific information or evidence that its machines worked with potential investors, citing concerns about revealing trade secrets.

Secrecy, in other words, became a screening mechanism. It repelled the investors most likely to ask hard technical questions and attracted those who trusted the founder's confidence and personal network instead. Shultz's family connection makes the point sharper: his grandfather, former U.S. Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury George Shultz, was himself a notable Theranos investor and board member.

When Theranos' fraud was uncovered, it was widely treated as a shrill wake-up call — a signal that investors needed to prioritize due diligence over founder charisma. Shultz worries that in the AI era, that lesson is already fading, and that the difficulty of evaluating AI claims makes the sector especially vulnerable to Theranos-style narratives.

What does the documentary actually show?

"You Can See Everything" has its own strange dynamic with its subject. The directors deliberately refuse to characterize Holmes as a master manipulator or as a victim. Instead, the film highlights her uncanny, almost hypnotic knack for making people pity her — even when they know exactly what her crimes were.

That framing extends to the film's very premise. Holmes is a mother of two young children, and she chose to invite a film crew to follow her final days with her family before surrendering to prison. The question of why she would do that seems inscrutable, but the answer is fairly clear: she wants people to pity her, and that pity could prove more useful for her future endeavors than hate or mockery.

Shultz has little patience for the renewed attention. "The only reason we're talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now is because she wants us to be talking about Elizabeth Holmes right now," he told the Standard.

His case is closed, and she is in federal prison — yet her con artistry has fascinated the media for the last decade. The documentary, Shultz implies, is part of a deliberate second-act strategy rather than an act of transparency.

What comes next for Holmes?

The film shows Holmes and her partner, hotel heir Billy Evans, working on Haemanthus, a diagnostics company they call "Theranos 2.0." The venture has reportedly raised about $20 million in funding.

Shultz watches that development with real concern. "I have this feeling of unease about what might come next," he said. "She's certainly preparing and beginning her second act, and I don't know exactly where it's going to go."

Critics of the documentary note what it leaves out. It doesn't make Holmes look good, but it glosses over the more heinous aspects of the Theranos fraud — the dangerously faulty medical information delivered to real patients, and the targeted harassment of Shultz himself while he was trying to sound the alarm about his former employer. In the cultural zeitgeist, Holmes remains more of a joke than a persona non grata, which may lower the reputational barriers to her return.

The through line of Shultz's warning is accountability for capital. Money handed to a compelling founder is power handed over, and in AI — where demos can be staged, claims are hard to falsify, and trillion-dollar valuations reward momentum over proof — the next Theranos may not need a fake blood machine at all.