An artificial intelligence shopping platform co-founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates is facing intense blowback across the digital advertising space after investigations revealed that its browser software systematically claimed commission checks for transactions it played no role in generating. The venture, called Phia, was set up by the 23-year-old alongside her Stanford University roommate Sophia Kianni as a consumer tool meant to alert online buyers to price reductions, recommend trending products, and automatically test coupon codes during checkout.
Under standard affiliate marketing rules, a platform earns a percentage cut from a brand only when a user intentionally clicks a specific referral link or applies an active discount. However, technical testing by independent advertising researchers and investigative outlets revealed that Phia was quietly rewriting how those digital referrals were tracked behind the scenes.
The inquiry demonstrated that when an online shopper navigated toward payment on major merchant websites, Phia’s browser extension automatically launched hidden tabs in the background to plant its own tracking tokens. By silently inserting these identifiers right before checkout, the code overwrote the existing referral cookies belonging to content creators, review blogs, media organizations, and digital marketing networks that had actually steered the shopper to the store in the first place.
Known in the industry as cookie stuffing or attribution hijacking, the tactic allowed the startup to take credit and collect cash payouts on sales where the shopper never clicked a Phia suggestion or used a platform-provided voucher. As details of the practice emerged, major affiliate network Impact.com cut off Phia’s account pending a complete compliance review.
The immediate drop in the company’s daily revenue highlighted just how much of its income was tied to the controversial tracking setup. Estimates suggest Phia’s daily intake fell from roughly $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000 once the automated background features were stripped out of the software. While the company insisted the revenue decline was also related to pausing other growth tests, it publicly acknowledged that its software had caused widespread misattributions.
Startup representatives framed the issue as an accidental technical glitch that slipped in during a software update rather than an intentional business model, stating that developers worked overnight to patch the code, audit transaction logs, and process refunds to impacted merchants. However, subsequent reports citing internal company communications indicated that leadership had discussed automatic cookie-dropping mechanics well before the public fallout.
This latest controversy comes on the heels of earlier user privacy complaints against the shopping tool. Security analysts had previously caught the browser extension scraping broad web browsing records including sensitive URLs from email clients and banking portals forcing the startup to restrict its data collection purely to shopping domains.
While neither founder faces formal legal charges, the unfolding scandal has fueled broader unease across e-commerce networks over how well venture-backed tech startups police their own attribution practices, shining a harsh light on transparency in the multi-billion-dollar affiliate economy.