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Pangram’s Max Spero on why AI detection is harder than ‘Real or Fake’ | Equity Podcast

The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real. A handful of startups have cropped…

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The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real.

A handful of startups have cropped up in the past couple of years to become the “trust layer” the internet needs — including Pangram. The startup recently snapped up $9 million for its AI detection system and landed a partnership with Substack, which is now using Pangram’s tech to show readers which of their favorite authors use AI to write their newsletters. Pangram also recently dropped a new AI image detection tool.

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Pangram co-founder and CEO Max Spero joins Rebecca Bellan to dig into the promise of AI detection tools and where to draw the line between AI assisted and AI generated.

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

1:15 Building Pangram: from binary detector to gauging AI assistance

2:06 Why job applications, reviews, and Amazon are drowning in slop

5:39 How Pangram actually spots AI writing

9:26 Where people draw the line on AI-assisted vs. AI-generated

12:50 The false positive problem, and “America has a Pangram problem”

14:30 Detecting fake images, now that AI photos are scarily good

19:13 Competing with GPTZero, Winston, and building “core infrastructure”

21:43 Will good writing jobs actually come back?

23:36 Outro

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1 Comment

1 Comment

  1. @OneKhanAlhamdulillah

    September 3, 2026 at 3:32 pm

    No you can’t just wait for next 6 months when their reversed engineered guess machine no longer works because LLM will soon give very diverse out.

    Nor will their model will ever work on someone local model who keeps changing his weight and datasets

    Reply

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Startup Battlefield: Health Tech & Life Sciences Pitches | Disrupt 2026

Founders from around the world pitch expert judges and compete for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. Each team gets six minutes to pitch and six minutes of Q&A with judges Dr. V. Agrawal (ODDBIRD VC), Andrew Brackin (Gradient), Nell Daly (Revenge Capital), James Joaquin (Obvious Ventures), and Miloni Madan Presler (IVP). This cohort’s competitors…

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October 14, 2026

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Founders from around the world pitch expert judges and compete for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. Each team gets six minutes to pitch and six minutes of Q&A with judges Dr. V. Agrawal (ODDBIRD VC), Andrew Brackin (Gradient), Nell Daly (Revenge Capital), James Joaquin (Obvious Ventures), and Miloni Madan Presler (IVP).

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#TechCrunchDisrupt2026

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Flock CEO Garrett Langley on Public Backlash, Surveillance Expansion | Disrupt 2026

Flock Safety sits at the intersection of an increasingly intense debate around the spread of surviellance technology, AI, and who’s using all of that information and to what ends. Founder and CEO Garrett Langley spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to defend his stance that Flock is a net positive in the face of concerns about…

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October 14, 2026

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Flock Safety sits at the intersection of an increasingly intense debate around the spread of surviellance technology, AI, and who’s using all of that information and to what ends. Founder and CEO Garrett Langley spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to defend his stance that Flock is a net positive in the face of concerns about its work monitoring communities, cities, and enabling data sharing across law enforcement agencies.

As a sign of that backlash, as Langley spoke on stage, a protest against Flock was taking place outside of Moscone West in San Francisco.

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Satya Nadella’s ‘emergency brake’ and the race to secure AI agents | Disrupt 2026

TechCrunch’s Equity podcast team took over the Builders Stage Tuesday morning to tackle a growing challenge for the AI industry: What happens when AI agents go off-script, and who’s responsible for keeping them in check? Recent incidents, from Anthropic pulling internal evaluations off the live internet after agents misbehaved to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calling…

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TechCrunch’s Equity podcast team took over the Builders Stage Tuesday morning to tackle a growing challenge for the AI industry: What happens when AI agents go off-script, and who’s responsible for keeping them in check?

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