Tech
A timeline of the Astronomer CEO Coldplay Kiss Cam fiasco that set the internet on fire
On July 15, during a Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, Astronomer CEO Andy Byron appeared on the kiss cam, embracing Kristin Cabot, the company’s head of HR. It would have been a cute candid moment if not for the fact that the pair immediately tried their absolute best to hide from the camera.
Within hours, the footage was online. Within a day, internet sleuths had identified both parties. By July 19, Byron was out of a job. What happened in between was a modern-day morality play starring a lot of doxxing, corporate statements, and the unrelenting content machine of online drama.
Yes, cheating is bad. However, the internet gets very, very weird about cheaters, and in this particular case, the social internet is gleefully making memes out of misery. Still, it’s hard to look away. And as someone who couldn't look away, here’s a full breakdown of how it started, how it spiraled, and where it stands now.
It started with a TikTok: July 15-17
On July 15, Byron and Cabot attended a Coldplay concert at Gillette Stadium, where they appeared on the kiss cam and quickly tried to scurry away after their alleged affair was revealed to the crowd. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin laughed and remarked, "Either they’re having an affair or they’re just very shy." The camera then cut to a red-faced woman standing beside them, visibly squirming with discomfort.
Internet sleuths quickly put the pieces together. By July 17, the video had blown up on TikTok, with 10.4 million likes and over a million shares. A new pop culture moment was born, which meant a lot of memes and floating talking heads breaking down the situation. The worst of which involved AI deepfakes of the CEO lashing out at the crowd for catching him cheating.
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Exactly how the internet identified Byron and Cabot isn’t clear, but according to 404 Media, it likely involved a mix of publicly available facial recognition tools and social media research. In the days after the 15-second clip went viral, the names of Byron, Cabot, and their spouses (or ex-husband in Cabot's case) spread across TikTok, Reddit, X, and — perhaps most awkwardly — LinkedIn.
For context: Byron was the CEO (now former) of Astronomer, a New York-based data analytics company that specializes in AI. Cabot was the company’s "Chief People Officer," which is just a corporate euphemism for Head of HR. While Astronomer wasn't widely known, until now, the company has previously been granted unofficial unicorn status, meaning it's a tech startup valued at $1 billion or more.
A phony apology: July 17
Over the weekend, social media voyeurs traded screenshots of an alleged apology statement issued by Byron on July 17. However, according to a report in The New York Post, this apology is fake, and Astronomer would later issue a statement denying its legitimacy.
The widely shared "apology" struck a regretful tone and ended in a cheesy Coldplay lyric (“As a friend once sang: ‘Lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones, and I will try to fix you.’”). In short, it was the kind of story that was too good not to share, even if it turned out to be completely false.
The Coldplay kiss cam moment achieves peak virality: July 18-present
In the days that followed, the discourse turned increasingly toxic. Social media's pursuit of justice often brings out its worst instincts. That’s not to defend or condemn Byron or Cabot, but platforms like X quickly devolved into a mess of misinformation, including fake statements attributed to Byron and even a rumor that he planned to sue Coldplay.
Some accounts even tried to drag the third person seen in the video — the visibly uncomfortable woman standing next to Byron and Cabot — into the mess. In doing so, they ended up falsely identifying and shaming an entirely unrelated woman, adding another layer of reckless collateral damage.
Other corporate entities even joined in on the fun, including NEON, the Philadelphia Phillies, and, somehow, the most tone-deaf of them all: the NYC Department of Sanitation. "Cameras are everywhere," the account said.
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As their messy private lives became painfully public, bettors at Polymarket found a new obsession. On July 18, trades began popping up with titles like "Andy Byron out as Astronomer CEO by next Friday?" and the "Astronomer Divorce Parlay" — a multi-leg trade requiring all outcomes to hit for a payout. In this case, it hinged on both Byron and Cabot getting divorced. The odds peaked at 21 percent after Byron’s wife removed his last name from her LinkedIn profile, before settling around 14 percent at the time of this writing.
This brings us to July 19, and hopefully, the end of this mess. Around midday, Astronomer’s official LinkedIn account posted a statement apologizing to clients for the media chaos Byron triggered and confirming his resignation as CEO.
"Before this week, we were known as a pioneer in the DataOps space, helping data teams power everything from modern analytics to production AI," the statement read. "While awareness of our company may have changed overnight, our product and our work for our customers have not."
It’s easy to write this off as just another viral cheating story, but it also says a lot about how quickly the internet can turn real people into punchlines, tabloid bait, or worse — prop bets. The machine doesn’t really care who’s right or wrong. It just wants something new to chew on. Here's hoping next month's pop culture moment is a little less dystopian.
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It seems OpenAI has been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar. Anthropic has reportedly cut off OpenAI’s access to Anthropic’s APIs over what Anthropic is calling a terms of service breach.
As reported by Wired, multiple sources claim that OpenAI has been cut off from Anthropic’s APIs. Allegedly, OpenAI was using Anthropic’s Claude Code to assist in creating and testing OpenAI’s upcoming GPT-5, which is due to release in August.
According to these sources, OpenAI was plugging into Claude’s internal tools instead of using the chat interface. From there, they used the API to run tests against GPT-5 to check things like coding and creative writing against Claude to compare performance. OpenAI allegedly also tested safety prompts related to things like CSAM, self-harm, and defamation. This would give OpenAI data that it could then use to fine-tune GPT-5 to make it more competitive against Claude.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, this violates Anthropic’s commercial terms of service, which ban companies from using Anthropic’s tools to build competitor AI products.
“Customer may not and must not attempt to access the Services to build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models or resell the Services except as expressly approved by Anthropic,” the terms read.
OpenAI responded by saying that what the company was doing was an industry standard, as all the AI companies test their models against the competing models. The company then went on to say that it respected Anthropic’s decision but expressed disappointment in having its API access shut off, especially considering that Anthropic’s access to OpenAI’s API remains open.
A spokesperson told Wired that OpenAI’s access would be reinstated for “benchmarking and safety evaluations.”
It’s not the first time this year that Anthropic has cut off API access. In June, the company cut off Windsurf’s API access after rumors that it was being sold to OpenAI. That deal ultimately fell through, but Anthropic’s cofounder, Jared Kaplan, told TechCrunch at the time that “it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI.”
Anthropic has also tweaked its rate limits for Claude, which will take effect in late August, with one of the reasons being that a small number of users are violating the company’s policy by sharing and reselling accounts.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
It’s the end of another quarter, which means it’s time for yet another earnings call with concerning ideas for generating more revenue. This time around, it's Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told shareholders on Thursday that there’s “significant financial opportunity” in delivering ads through Alexa+, the company’s new AI-powered voice assistant.
“I think over time, there will be opportunities, you know, as people are engaging in more multi-turn conversations to have advertising play a role — to help people find discovery and also as a lever to drive revenue,” Jassy said, per the investor call transcript.
Since launching earlier this year, Alexa+ has reportedly reached millions of users. Unlike the original Alexa, which mostly turns off lights and sets timers, Alexa+ is designed to be more conversational, context-aware, and AI-driven. It can help you plan your date night, entertain your kids, and even dabble in basic image and video generation — all under the banner of your $14.99/month Prime subscription.
But so far, Amazon Alexa has been an ad-free experience. It's also more than 10 years old, and it doesn't make money; thus, it's been deemed a "colossal failure" by those within the company.
Of course, Amazon isn’t alone in trying to figure out how to make AI pay for itself. Both Google and OpenAI have explored ad integration in their AI products as a way to generate revenue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in particular, has made a notable pivot: once firmly against advertising in his chatbot, he’s since reversed course, possibly opening the door for ads in future versions of ChatGPT.
Whatever the motivation, injecting ads into Alexa+ would mark a major shift in both user experience and Amazon’s strategy, especially given the assistant’s long history of being expensive to maintain and hard to monetize. Ad-supported Alexa+ could be Amazon’s attempt to finally turn its once-money-burning smart assistant into a revenue machine, without hiking the subscription fee (at least for now).
Alexa+ is still new, and what an ad-supported experience would actually look like remains unclear. According to Jassy, the idea is to frame ads as helpful, something to assist customers in discovering products they might be interested in buying.
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