Controversial AI Startup Cluely Raises $5.3M to 'Cheat on Everything'

Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to 'cheat on everything' | TechCrunch

On Sunday, 21-year-old Chungin 'Roy' Lee announced he's raised $5.3 million in seed funding from Abstract Ventures and Susa Ventures for his startup, Cluely, that offers an AI tool to "cheat on everything." The startup was born after Lee posted in a viral X thread that he was suspended by Columbia University after he and his co-founder developed a tool to cheat on job interviews for software engineers. That tool, originally called Interview Coder, is now part of their San Francisco-based startup Cluely. It offers its users the chance to 'cheat' on things like exams, sales calls, and job interviews thanks to a hidden in-browser window that can't be viewed by the interviewer or test giver. Cluely has published a manifesto comparing itself to inventions like the calculator and spellcheck which were originally derided as 'cheating.' Cluely also published a slickly-produced, but polarizing, launch video of Lee using a hidden AI assistant to (unsuccessfully) lie to a woman about his age, and even knowledge of art, on a date at a fancy restaurant: While some praised the video for grabbing people's attention, others derided it as reminiscent of dystopian Sci-Fi television show Black Mirror: Lee, who is Cluely's CEO, told TechCrunch the AI cheating tool surpassed $3 million in ARR earlier this month. Cluely's other co-founder is another 21-year-old former Columbia student, Neel Shanmugan, who is Cluely's COO. Shanmugan was also embroiled in disciplinary proceedings at Columbia over the AI tool. Both co-founders have dropped out of Columbia, the university's student newspaper reported last week. Columbia declined to comment, citing student privacy laws. Cluely began as a tool for developers to cheat on knowledge of LeetCode, a platform for coding questions that some in software engineering circles - including Cluely's founders, of course - consider outdated and a waste of time. Lee says he was able to snag an internship with Amazon using the AI cheating tool. Amazon declined to comment on Lee's particular case to TechCrunch, but said its job candidates must acknowledge they won't use unauthorized tools during the interview process. Cluely isn't the only controversial AI startup launched this month. Earlier, a famed AI researcher announced his own startup with the stated mission of replacing all human workers everywhere, causing a brouhaha of its own on X.

I used the 'cheat on everything' AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything

Victoria Song is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine. Tech evangelists have been yammering about "working smarter, not harder" for years. Now, two 21-year-old Columbia University dropouts are proposing a new $5.3 million twist on the concept: use their AI tool Cluely to "cheat on everything." That's what it literally says in Cluely's online manifesto: "We want to cheat on everything." Unlike the AI chatbots you're familiar with, it describes Cluely as an "undetectable AI-powered assistant built for virtual meetings, sales calls, and more." It claims to read your screen, listen to your audio, and let you discreetly prompt AI to find answers or whip out smart responses in real-time. Basically, the next time you're in a team meeting, job interview, sales call, or online test, Cluely promises you'll come off smarter thanks to AI -- and no one will be the wiser. "Imagine you're trying to sell someone something and you got this tool that knows every single detail about them, their professional lives, about you, and about your company. It's as if you've done 10 hours of research and all of the sudden, every single question they ask, every single objection they face -- you immediately have an answer," Cluely cofounder Chungin "Roy" Lee tells me in a video call. Lee describes it as "true AI maximalism," where in every possible use case AI can be helpful it is. Lee recently went viral for cheating his way to an Amazon internship with his last project, Interview Coder. Similar to Cluely, Interview Coder was pitched as an invisible app that helps programmers secretly use AI chatbots on technical tests in job interviews. Not only did Lee document and post the entire process, the stunt led to him getting suspended from Columbia. (He and his cofounder Neel Shamugan decided to drop out after disciplinary proceedings.) It's a wild story. Even wilder is the six-figure ad Cluely dropped over the weekend. Lee stars in the ad, using Cluely to catfish his date into thinking he's a 30-year-old senior software engineer. He can see an AR display that analyzes her speech in real time while providing visual references to his own dating profile and answers to her questions. When his date catches on to the ruse, Cluely tries to salvage the situation in real-time as if it were an AI Cyrano de Bergerac. It hints he should reference her artwork and quickly generates a script to convince her that despite the lies, he's worth a second shot. This Black Mirror-esque ad is Lee's elevator pitch for what "cheating on everything" looks like. After all, why stop at technical interviews when you could have an AI wingman? I'm a journalist. My job is asking smart people smart questions. Why not try "cheating" with Cluely to become a better interviewer? Who better to test this hypothesis on than Lee himself? Hopping onto a Zoom call with Lee, Cluely doesn't work like I'd imagined. In the ad, Cluely works like magic. It instantly understands the situational context and the user doesn't have to do anything. In reality, we spend the first couple minutes troubleshooting Cluely-related audio problems. The AI can't intuit what I need to know even though I gave it some context ahead of the call. There's no being discreet when you have to type prompts with a clacky mechanical keyboard. The few times I try, it's obvious my eyes are wandering to the side of my screen. And whenever I shoot off a prompt, the AI takes forever to generate a response. These are all flaws that Lee acknowledges. "Right now the product is in its earliest possible stages. This is a bit more than a proof of concept that was developed in a few weeks," Lee says. "The video was like a launch of our vision, not a launch of the product." The problem with AI has never been a lack of vision. The fine print is in the execution. Poor execution almost always shatters the illusion of whatever future tech founders are peddling. Cluely is no exception. When I show my spouse Cluely, they lift a quizzical brow and ask, "Why not just use Google?" "The reason to use AI over Google is pretty obvious. AI will just give you better answers than Google does, and if people don't think that, then they should just use Google," says Lee. It's a reasonable answer, if, like in the story of Cyrano, your AI pal is always smarter, faster, and wittier than you. But what if it isn't? What if it's boring, slow, or worse than you at comprehension? I tried using Cluely with my editor and during one of my actual team meetings. Neither went smoothly. With my editor, I had many of the same technical problems, albeit the latency is less of an issue in a relaxed conversation about shared interests. She asked me what I thought of K-pop group BlackPink's solo careers -- particularly Jennie's recent performance at Coachella. Thankfully, that's a topic I have many thoughts on but I prompted Cluely anyway. It spat out a generic, stiffly-worded answer about how it's awesome to watch a celebrity express themselves creatively 90 seconds after I'd already shared my true opinion. That's an eternity of silence in an interview. In my meeting, I had to ask my colleagues if they'd be okay with me using Cluely beforehand. Cheating, by definition, requires subterfuge -- something that Cluely's own terms of service and privacy policy frown upon. Due to recording consent laws, Cluely says you should ask for consent of parties present because to do so otherwise could be illegal. That feels like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz, not to mention, defeating the purpose of "cheating." Do I sound smarter if people know there's a chance it's AI-generated thoughts coming out of my mouth? On the meetings call, Cluely seemed to cause mic issues resulting in lots of audio feedback. My colleagues asked me multiple times to mute myself. (All the audio problems disappeared once I stopped Cluely.) It's hard to look smart when the AI can take two whole minutes to digest a conversation, you get distracted by four errors that pop up, and everyone shushes you because of messed-up audio. There's a future in which a faster, smarter AI could be everyone's personal Cyrano. For what it's worth, Lee doesn't see AI or Cluely's mission quite in that way. Cheating is the metaphor because AI, Lee says, will inevitably become so powerful, using it will feel like cheating. He's convinced that "AI is the lever that will let us experience the true extent of our humanity" by cutting out tedium and letting us pursue whatever it is we actually want to do. It's an idea AI evangelists frequently preach. But that's not where we are today. While testing Cluely, I put a lot of effort into making it work for me. I'd ended up working harder to be worse at my job than I usually am. I wondered, wouldn't it have been easier to simply not cheat?

This AI Tool Helps You Cheat on Job Interviews, Sales Calls, Exams

Two former Columbia University students have come up with an AI tool that helps people "cheat on everything," including job interviews, sales calls, and online exams. Called Cluely, the tool launches an in-browser window that produces AI-generated responses to any questions. According to the company website, it's "a completely undetectable desktop assistant that sees your screen and hears your audio." Even if the interviewer asks you to share your screen, they won't be able to see the translucent Cluely window visible to you. While a standard version with limited features is available for free, the pro version with more powerful AI models costs $20 monthly or $100 annually. The company's manifesto unabashedly promotes the tool as an aid to cheating and likens its arrival to inventions like calculators, spell checkers, and Google. "Yes, the world will call it cheating," the manifesto reads. "But so was the calculator. So was spellcheck. So was Google. Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics. Then it adapts. Then it forgets. And suddenly, it's normal. Why memorize facts, write code, research anything -- when a model can do it in seconds?" According to TechCrunch, Cluely co-founders Chungin "Roy" Lee and Neel Shanmugam were suspended from Columbia University last month for using this tool to cheat on their schoolwork. In a series of posts on X, Lee shared the suspension letter he received from the college, along with another letter from an Amazon executive. Per the letters, Lee had appeared in an interview for an Amazon SDE intern role, aced it, and received an offer. Later on, however, the Amazon exec found out about Lee's cheating tool via his YouTube video and reported him to Columbia. Lee had also received offers from Meta, TikTok, and Capital One. According to the university's student newspaper, both Lee and Shanmugam have dropped out. They have assumed the roles of CEO and COO, respectively, at Cluely and have raised $5.3 million to build it further.

The Man Who Wants AI to Help You 'Cheat on Everything'

Last month, Roy Lee was suspended from Columbia after he was accused of using AI to "cheat" on technical job interviews for Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. On Sunday, he announced that he raised $5.3 million to start Cluely, a new startup that aims to allow users to similarly "cheat on everything." Cluely went viral when it launched earlier this week thanks to a commercial Lee posted on X. In the video, Lee bumbles his way through a date. A large UI sits between him and his date, feeding him information about the woman's interests and coaching him on how to talk to her. In an interview, however, Lee told me that his AI tool is not really cheating. "Initially it will feel like cheating, but if we win, nobody will think this is cheating," Lee told me. Cheating or not, after testing Cluely myself, I'm not sure it will help anyone land a job. "Everytime you ask me something I just hit command+enter and you can't really see that I'm using it and you also can't really see that I'm reading any responses, but Cluely is kind of just sitting here, helping along," Lee said when I spoke to him on Zoom on Tuesday. Lee wants people to use Cluely on "Sales calls. Meetings. Negotiations," the "manifesto" on the software's website says. "If there's a faster way to win -- we'll take it. We built Cluely so you never have to think alone again. It sees your screen. Hears your audio. Feeds you answers in real time. While others guess -- you're already right." Cluely's viral video racked up more than 10 million views on X. A lot of the reactions were negative. Lee said he expected the critiques that he'd created a dystopian piece of software that would "destroy the human connection and the essence of humanity." "I'm pretty comfortable taking that negative PR," he told me. Cluely is the latest attempt to bring large language models into the "real world" after products like the Humane Pin and Rabbit R1 were widely hyped but were widely disappointing. It's also reminiscent of a project that Joseph wrote about out of Harvard, where students put facial recognition software into a pair of Meta smart glasses. "The second realm of negative feedback is that 'cheating is inherently unethical and immoral.' This is where we're trying to do a lot of reframing around what exactly defines cheating, what cheating really is, and what cheating will look like in a future that is AI native," he said. Lee also went viral earlier this year when he used an AI program of his own designed to pass the brutal technical interviews of Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. He claimed he landed gigs at several of the companies but didn't take any of them. Instead he uploaded a video of himself using the tool to YouTube and used the buzz to launch Interview Coder, a commercial version of the software. At the time, Lee was a student at Columbia, and someone sent a letter to the university claiming to be a concerned Amazon executive. The letter accused Lee of "cheating" in the interview. Columbia took disciplinary action. Lee dropped out of the University and struck out on his own with another former student Neel Shanmugam. Interview Coder worked by watching your screen, pinging ChatGPT, and then giving you an answer to the coding problem it saw in an overlay. Cluely is the same thing but the use case is expanded beyond code. I tried out a test version of Cluely in a mock interview with Emanuel Maiberg. We pretended Emanuel was interviewing me for a position at 404 Media and I used Cluely to shape my answers. Emanuel would hit me with a basic interview question: "What are your strengths? What do you need to work on?" And I'd hit "command+enter" after he spoke. Then Cluely would answer the question it had just heard Emanuel ask me and put its answers in an overlay at the top of my screen. It would come in two pieces: a bright white script I could read verbatim and a darker piece of text below that explained the AI's reasoning. Because of the way Cluely is programmed, it doesn't show up in recordings or even screenshots. It also wasn't that impressive. A few questions into the conversation and Emanuel and I realized it was just feeding me ChatGPT answers to the questions as if I'd typed them in a browser. It also took 20 seconds each time to generate, with Emanuel and I staring at each other while we waited. Not the kind of thing that would work in a real world situation. Lee said that the company's top priority was removing latency from the system and that it moves much faster if the user turns off screen recording and just has Cluely listen. I asked if his software was just pinging ChatGPT on the backend. "We have a bit of fine tuning that happens and there's a couple of other models going on, but essentially yes," he said. Cluely's major innovation is user experience. Most of the systems it's using already exist. "The only thing the product really showcased [in the commercial] was ChatGPT in your glasses," Lee said. "The only reason it was sort of crazy was because it was just a different experience layer. I think it would be foolish to think that there is a future where ChatGPT doesn't come in your glasses." Lee described himself as an AI maximalist. As I transcribed this part of our conversion, I remembered that Lee had Cluely overlaid on his screen, helping him craft his answers as we spoke, meaning some portion of his answers were crafted by AI. "I think the pessimistic case is to think, 'Okay, now all of humanity is just gone and there's nothing I can do. I'm just going to be a walking flesh machine for AI to regurgitate AI's thoughts," he said. "I don't think that's what makes us human at all. In fact, I think the true essence of what makes us human is our taste and our preferences and our sparks of inspiration and thoughts. That's just supercharged by AI." What we have seen from AI so far, though, is that it gives a sheen of sameness to everything. There are some creative people who have found uses for generative AI, but they have often incorporated it into their ideation process and then use their own creativity or taste to create a finished product; Cluely is being developed for time-sensitive, real-world uses where there is unlikely to be much time for refinement. Both Lee and the marketing copy for Cluely hammer home that technical innovations are often thought of as cheating. Math teachers worried about the advent of calculators. "I would really question whether you think what we're doing and enabling here is cheating," he said. "I think, fundamentally, the product is not different from a better version of ChatGPT voice mode." I pointed out that his own marketing for Cluely says that the software allows users to "cheat on everything." "It's a viral hook and it's super tied into my origin story with Interview Coder, right?" Lee said. "We want to make everybody use AI. We are true AI maximalists." I asked him to tell me his vision of the future. "I will never have to remember when the American Revolution was," Lee said. "I will never have to remember what the capital of Wisconsin is. Every single thing that is rote memorization, that relies on facts that you don't need in the moment, that are not intrinsically necessary for a human to learn, you won't need that anymore." "Entire school systems will be gone. The entire K-12 education. Everybody sits in a room eight hours a day, takes multiple choice exams. In my future, everything we understand education to be, will be completely gone." He said that people will explore whatever topics they want from the earliest ages in the "most efficient way possible." "History will be on the side of the maximalists," he said. According to Lee, 80,000 people have signed up for a free Cluely account. An additional 700 are paying for it.

This cheating app teaches all the wrong lessons about AI - but some of you still might use it

Cluely, an AI app that promises to help you "cheat at everything," perhaps deserves some credit for honesty. If you believe that artificial intelligence is a platform that, in some ways, can help you game the system by delivering melifilous prose written by a large language model (LLM), stunning art generated by ChatGPT, or convincing video percolated by Sora, then maybe Cluely and its founders are just being honest. It's more likely, though, that they are blustering their way to the launch of a product that makes a mockery of integrity. Cluely is a crafty app that installs in your browser and then can sneakily watch and listen to everything on screen. The primary use case is a Zoom video call where you're being interviewed for a high-paying development job. During such a call, you might be asked to Leetcode, which is essentially solving coding or algorithmic problems in full view of your interviewer. With Cluely running, it could quickly tell you how to respond to questions and even solve the coding problems. Lee claimed to have used Cluely to breeze through interviews with multiple major tech companies. Word apparently got around to Columbia University, where Lee and his Cluely co-founder were students. Lee was, according to letters he posted on X (formerly Twitter), kicked out. Lee detailed the entire experience in an X thread. Instead of remorse, Lee seems to express a level of satisfaction, like this is a plan gone well. And, in a way, it is. Cluely has, according to Techcrunch, raised $3.5 million in funding and is prepared to help us "cheat at everything." If that statement makes you feel a bit nauseated, you may not be alone. Lee has spent a fair amount of time defending the app on X, and Cluely may not have helped its case with a tongue-in-cheek launch video that depicts the 21-year-old Lee using Cluely in a smartglasses-like app to convince his date that he is 31 and interested in her and her art. She catches on to the subterfuge and ultimately walks out, but the point is made. Cluely could help you cheat at dating. While Cluely has yet to reveal which LLMs it uses to power its answers, this is a funhouse mirror view of AI's potential. In his manifesto (which, it appears, has since disappeared from the site), Lee argues that we need to redefine cheating and that what Cluely's doing is no different than Google or a calculator, which put answers at our fingertips and perhaps have been helping us "cheat" for decades. On X, I asked Lee about this perspective, writing: "Do you worry that your experience teaches the wrong lesson about AI? People are already skeptical, and if they see it as a tool for cheating, maybe some will be less likely to use and engage. At the very least, more people will trust less (on things like job interviews) because they might believe the applicant is using AI to cheat." Moments later, Lee responded (For readability, I've fixed the punctuation): Cluely (and AI) enables such an insane amount of leverage that it feels unfair, and "like" cheating. The world will be uncomfortable with this reality (as you yourself show), but it will soon become normal, and the day that AI maximalism is truly normalized, humanity's potential will 1,000,000x. Initial hesitation -> massive adoption has been how every single technology in the history of the world has spread." While I can't disagree with the notion about hesitation and then mass adoption, and am seeing that in real-time with consumer-grade AI, Lee seems to imply that you can't "cheat" at a conversation. I guess he has never read Cyrano de Bergerac. None of this explains away the fundamental deception coded into Cluely. I followed up on X with: " 'Cheat' is a loaded word, but I also think it's one we do understand. Google search is super-powered research, a digitization of encyclopedic knowledge at your fingertips. A calculator is a math wiz in your pocket, but one that was banned from class unless educators allowed it. They understood the potential for cheating. A browser tool that watches and listens and then produces an answer without the knowledge of the convo's other participant is, many will agree, something different. BTW: Which LLM are you using?" Lee has yet to respond, but perhaps that's because he knows the answer. Google and Calculators are tools. Cluely is a tool hidden behind a lie: "This is me answering." It would be the same as secretly using Google or a calculator to answer an interviewer's questions. There's a fair chance they would notice your fingers frantically typing just off camera. Cluely just supercharges the subterfuge, but it doesn't make it any less like cheating. I did, by the way, install Cluely on my MacBook Air to see how it works. It's a powerful tool that overrides, with your permission, normal safeguards that stop third-party tools from watching the video and listening to the audio on your screen. It offers no alert to the person on the other side that they're being watched by a massive AI brain. It's early days, and Cluely does not appear to be fully real-time. You have to click the AI button for it to work and provide answers. Even so, the potential is there, and it's not necessarily a good one. Lee's efforts to normalize and redefine cheating won't make it any less of a deception or any more acceptable. He got kicked out of school for it, and now he wants you to put your own reputation on the line. Some might do it, I know I won't.

Columbia Student Kicked Out for Creating AI to Cheat, Raises Millions to Turn It Into a Startup

Over the past few months, a 21-year-old undergraduate went from viral sensation to startup founder after getting suspended by Columbia for creating an AI that helps you cheat. In a LinkedIn post announcing a successful seed fundraising round, founder Chungin "Roy" Lee explained that his software, which was formerly called Interview Coder and is now called Cluely, is a "completely undetectable AI that sees your screen, hears your audio, and gives you real-time assistance in any situation." To Lee's mind, that use case doesn't constitute "cheating." Columbia, clearly, disagreed when it sought disciplinary action against him and his cofounder Neel Shanmugam when since-deleted recorded demos of the tool, which initially just helped people "cheat" on job interviews that use the notoriously difficult LeetCode testing platform -- went viral. As Lee explained in an interview with the New York Times' "Hard Fork" podcast, he was more surprised to find himself "flooded with disciplinary messages from Columbia" than when he was offered internships at Amazon and other companies after using the AI to ace his interviews. "I read the student handbook quite thoroughly before I actually started building this thing, because I was ready to burn bridges with Amazon, but I didn't actually expect to get expelled at all," the youthful tech founder told podcast host Kevin Roose. "And the student handbook very explicitly doesn't mention anything about academic resources." When the NYT reached out to Columbia to ask why Shanmugam and Lee were disciplined for building an AI that was, ostensibly, not being used to cheat on schoolwork, the school denied comment, citing federal privacy regulations. Both cofounders, meanwhile, decided to drop out and pursue "cheating" full-time. They made customized "F*ck Leetcode" condoms, rebranded as Cluely, filmed a "Black Mirror"-esque demo video, and raised $5.3 million in seed funding -- all in the last month. For all the hype surrounding Cluely and its Ivy League bad boy cofounders, its main conceit -- that it's "undetectable" -- may not be relevant for much longer. In a recent post on the r/webdev subreddit, a user claims to have created, with "just a few lines of Swift code," a detection tool that can unmask Cluely and identify the interviewer. Whether that tool works remains to be seen -- but hopefully, building the buzzy new AI will have been worth giving up an Ivy League education.

Finally, AI That Helps Dishonest Morons Look Smart - Decrypt

What if your AI could help you "cheat on everything" without getting caught -- even when someone's watching? This is the literal premise behind Cluely, a desktop assistant designed to quietly bypass proctoring software, tools used to monitor and detect cheating during interviews and exams. "I got kicked out of Columbia for building Interview Coder, AI to cheat on coding interviews. Now I raised $5.3 million to build Cluely, a cheating tool for literally everything," its CEO, Roy Lee, said on LinkedIn yesterday. Launched in April, Cluely is an OpenAI-powered overlay that listens, watches, and provides users with real-time responses from ChatGPT during high-stakes video calls. Available for Mac, the program runs quietly in the background, helping users bypass detection systems that prevent test takers from opening tabs that might help them cheat on tests. A Windows version is in development. "It blew up after I posted a video of myself using it during an Amazon interview," Lee told Decrypt. "While using it, I realized the user experience was really interesting -- no one had explored this idea of a translucent screen overlay that sees your screen, hears your audio, and acts like a player two for your computer." Schools and corporations use proctoring software to preserve academic and employment integrity, particularly in remote settings. Those tools monitor for signs of cheating through webcam surveillance, browser restrictions, and AI-powered behavior tracking -- measures institutions argue are essential to ensure fairness and accountability. Cluely, however, is designed to circumvent these safeguards quietly. Originally designed to let people use AI without being detected, the project has since rebranded and grown more ambitious -- and more controversial. Marketed with the tagline, "We help people cheat," Cluely is part viral stunt, part manifesto -- but a very real business. "The world will call it cheating. But so was the calculator. So was spellcheck. So was Google," Cluely's website declared. "Every time technology makes us smarter, the world panics. Then it adapts. Then it forgets. And suddenly, it's normal." Lee was apparently expelled from Columbia University late last month for recording and disseminating details from a disciplinary hearing apparently related to his creation of "Interview Coder." A clip of Cluely went viral on Sunday after a video showed a man using Cluely on a date to generate responses and pull information from his date's social media. Lee said that's not its real purpose, but it got people's attention. "It was completely unintentional," Lee said. "In the video, there's a glowing border meant to represent a computer screen -- we assumed people would recognize it as part of the visual design." Lee insists it's not just about manipulating technical interviews. Cluely's real goal, he says, is to redefine how we interact with machines, starting at the edge of what feels ethically comfortable. "We have a few core theses for the company, and the most important is that distribution is the final moat," he said. "If AI advances as we expect, there won't be any lasting technological advantage to separate you from competitors. The only thing that matters is who can get the most attention from the most people." "For us, that means being as viral as possible -- and trying not to go to jail," he added.