// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Pangram Has Emerged as the Gold Standard of AI Detection. Should You Trust It?
Pangram is an AI startup with 24 employees, headquartered above a Popeyes in Brooklyn. It has raised $13 million to date—about 0.0072 percent of what OpenAI has—and was virtually unknown until earlier this year. But if Pangram is to be believed, it’s the one force standing in the way of a full machine takeover of the written word.
Pangram promises to detect how much AI was involved in the generation of any given text, and it does so as a best-guess percentage (using AI, of course). In January, speculation swirled on Reddit and YouTube that the author Mia Ballard may have used AI to write Shy Girl, a self-published novel picked up for traditional publication by Hachette. Although Ballard denied it, Pangram’s CEO posted on X that the book was 78 percent AI-generated. Hachette later canceled the release.
A barrage of similar accusations followed. The New York Times was called out for running an AI-generated installment of its Modern Love column. Pangram score: 100 percent. Then came a winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (100 percent), the novel Daggermouth (60 percent), and a thriller titled Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body that had sold for $2.4 million (97 percent). In late July, Substack announced it was integrating Pangram into its platform so readers could quickly determine possible AI use.
Not all writers see this as a good thing. “There is such distaste and anger at the AI detection software,” says Jane Friedman, an author and publishing expert. “There’s this feeling like they are just as evil, if not more evil, than the AI companies themselves.” Outside of publishing and higher education, Pangram isn’t a household name, but I suspect it’s about to be; the demand to distinguish LLM churn from human writing grows with each passing day. The question to ask now is: How much can the company be trusted?
Max Spero, Pangram’s 30-year-old cofounder and CEO, dials into our Google Meet from his phone, takeout box in one hand and skyscrapers in the background. He’s wearing a beige T-shirt and has short dark hair, a boyish expression, and a wide smile. He says he’s rushing home with lunch and will call back. Ten minutes later, Spero reappears inside his Brooklyn apartment. He’s been on hiring calls all morning, he says. In July, Pangram raised $9 million and announced the launch of its newest model, Pangram 4. The company’s website lists six new job openings, which would increase headcount by 25 percent.
I ask Spero about growing up in California, a softball question that makes him visibly uncomfortable. Discussing the nuances of Pangram’s tech comes more naturally to him than answering personal queries—or speaking to the company’s involvement in literary scandals. Spero takes a bite of his meal and says he was raised in the Los Angeles suburb of La Crescenta. He loved programming and joined his school’s robotics team. As an undergrad at Stanford, he met Bradley Emi, his eventual Pangram cofounder. (My several emailed requests to interview Emi were ignored by the company’s comms team.) After school, Spero went to Google, where he worked on FLoC, a technology designed to replace third-party cookies by grouping Chrome users by interests. (Google killed off FLoC in 2022 after the product was met with privacy concerns.) Spero later worked for the autonomous car company Nuro, while Emi made his way through Tesla and AI biotech company Absci. After ChatGPT launched in 2022, the duo saw a business opportunity to confront a future filled with AI content. In 2023, they founded Checkfor.ai, then renamed the company Pangram a year later. By then, at least a dozen other companies were crowding the detection space, including Originality.ai, GPTZero, and Turnitin; Pangram performed well in some early, independent testing and emerged as a front-runner.
As our interview progresses, Spero’s responses seem sticky, stopping and starting, and not just because he’s eating. I ask about his hiring ethos. Spero murmurs “hmm” before turning away wit