Just weeks after being expelled from Columbia University for using artificial intelligence to cheat in a job interview, 21-year-old Chungin Lee has turned scandal into startup success. His new company, Cluely, has already raised $5.3 million in venture capital and attracted more than 70,000 paying users, all drawn by a bold promise: a personal AI assistant that can help you “cheat on everything.”
Unlike ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms that search the internet, Cluely operates as an undetectable desktop app that scans users’ screens and listens to their conversations in real time, offering context-specific responses during live interactions — whether it’s a job interview, sales call, or even a date.
Lee, who co-founded the San Francisco-based startup with fellow 21-year-old Neel Shanmugam, describes Cluely as a tool that “knows everything about you, sees what you see, hears what you hear.” Users pay $20 a month for access to the app, which currently takes about ten seconds to generate a response. The company says faster response times are on the horizon, with ambitions to expand into “all sorts of scenarios.”
Cluely’s unapologetically provocative manifesto compares the tool to calculators, spellcheck, and Google. “The future won’t reward effort. It’ll reward leverage,” it reads. “So, start cheating. Because when everyone does, no one is.”
In a conversation with The Times, assisted by Cluely itself, Lee defended the philosophy. “The human instinct is to look at a tool like this and think ‘this is such an unfair advantage’,” he said. “But in reality, it’s just a hundred times more efficient.”
The app’s launch video, which has gone viral, shows Lee using smart glasses powered by Cluely during a date. He lies about his age and uses AI to appear knowledgeable about art — a scene critics have compared to something out of Black Mirror. Lee acknowledges the dystopian tone, calling it “part of the fun” in demonstrating the potential of the tech.
Not everyone is laughing. Professor Freddie Seba, an AI ethics expert at the University of San Francisco, said the app represents a slippery slope. “If you believe everybody’s cheating, I mean why pay taxes, right? Why stop at the traffic light?” he said. “Imagine society if everyone believed gaming the system was justified.”
Privacy concerns also loom. According to Cluely’s own policy, the app may collect and store users’ screen and audio data — a detail that’s already drawing scrutiny.
Still, Cluely has quickly become one of the fastest-growing AI startups of the year, arriving at a moment when U.S. tech giants are expected to spend over $320 billion on AI in 2025 alone.
Whether Cluely is the next big step in AI-human integration — or a warning signal — remains up for debate. But one thing is clear: for better or worse, the line between human and machine is getting blurrier by the day.
