Engadget36%
Phoebe Gates' AI Shopping App Phia Reportedly Claimed Unearned Affiliate Sales Through Fake Clicks 47%
By Cheyenne MacDonald22%
7/11/2026, 8:29:36 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 7 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Recency Bias, with Bandwagon as the most egregious example at 15.5% saturation with 39 hits. Analysis detected 139 faulty-reasoning hits from 251 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 49% and a BS Rank of 47% (8,103 of 15,051 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 53.80% of the article peer group.
Phoebe Gates' AI shopping app Phia reportedly claimed unearned affiliate sales through fake clicks
Gates, who is Bill Gates’ daughter, founded the app alongside Sophia Kianni.
By Cheyenne MacDonald
July 11, 2026 4:29 pm EST
According to multiple reports, the AI-powered shopping plugin Phia used a tactic known as cookie stuffing to attach its affiliate code to sales it didn't actually drive.
Phia, which launched last spring, was co-founded by Phoebe Gates — Bill Gates' daughter — and Sophia Kianni.
Investigations by researcher Ben Edelman , Bloomberg and Capital One Shopping all reportedly found instances of the browser extension claiming referrals through fake clicks, and even taking credit for sales that other publishers should have gotten the commission for.
Edelman published a detailed breakdown on how this worked, complete with a video showing Phia's "affiliate link invisibly loaded into a second tab" on iOS after visiting a merchant's website.
It's worth reading through.
Phia has blamed the issues highlighted in the investigations on a bug.
In a statement to Bloomberg , a spokesperson for the company said, "Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users.
As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue."
The feature that enabled all of this rolled out in December 2025, Edelman and Bloomberg both reported.
Speakers
1speaker22%attributed speech196writer words
Voice mapSelect a segment to jump to its words
Selected voice
0%flagged-word coveragePhia
55 attributed words100% of attributed speech71% writer coverage
Biased Writer Voice-2.0 pts
Writer 2.0%Phia 0%
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Analysis
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