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In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—Philip K. Dick’s dystopian 1986 novel, later adapted into the movie Blade Runner—a bounty hunter is tasked with killing cyborgs who look deceptively similar to humans. A polygraph-like device can distinguish between the two. Max Spero, the thirty-year-old cofounder and CEO of Pangram, an AI detection tool, likens his company to that machine. “In a sense,” he told me, “we’re detecting whether something is an android or a human.”
Spero—who calls himself “the internet’s slop janitor”—met me at a Brooklyn café a few weeks after a big announcement for the company: Substack was partnering with Pangram to enable readers to scan posts and test whether the writing had been produced using generative AI. “When readers have to wonder if what they’re reading is real, it undermines trust in authorship and threatens the livelihood of writers—including those who use AI tools thoughtfully to produce work they believe in,” Chris Best, a cofounder of Substack, wrote in a post announcing the partnership. “Platforms that reward fakeness will create a race to the bottom.”
Spero met Best in June through Jasmine Sun, who writes about AI for The Atlantic and on her own Substack, which has just over thirty thousand subscribers. Sun ran into Best at a Substack event—where she gave a talk on independent writing in the age of AI—and told him that he should think about partnering with Pangram. “Basically every time I ran into someone from Substack, I’d be like, ‘You guys should work with Pangram,’” Sun, who’d previously worked as a product manager at Substack, told me. (The night before the event, she had attended a dinner hosted by Pangram.) Best, who had been worried about slop, asked Sun to make the introduction to Spero.
Central to Pangram’s ethos is the proposition that the internet should be a more honest place. “I think there are cases where AI is used to synthesize massive amounts of data and it’s a very useful tool for research; there are also cases where somebody hasn’t bothered to write their newsletters themselves,” Spero told me. “If you’re not going to bother writing your newsletter, why should I read it?”
Spero founded Pangram in 2023 alongside Bradley Emi, who is now the company’s chief technology officer. (Previously, he’d worked at Google and Neuro, the self-driving-car startup.) Since then, Pangram has grown popular among writers, journalists, and academics. A 2025 study by the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics found that Pangram “achieves essentially zero false positive rates and false negative rates on medium-length to long passages.” In April, Taylor Lorenz, the technology journalist, called it the “best tool on the market.”
The Substack partnership is one of many recent advances for the company. This spring, Pangram announced a deal with NewsGuard, which rates outlets’ biases; it also works with PubShield, a platform that scans manuscripts for AI use and plagiarism, and Tremau, a content moderation company, among others. In July, Menlo Ventures, a venture capital firm, raised nine million dollars for Pangram.
Pangram’s rise comes amid an outcry over AI-generated writing. (Claude, Anthropic’s large language model, is now adding a watermark to AI-generated text.) But Pangram does have its detractors, some of whom believe that the tool is inaccurate, even dangerous: “Substack’s newest subscription model: guilty until proven human,” a content creator wrote. “What is Pangram actually for?” asked another. “Virtue signaling and witch hunts.” Spero said countering that narrative has been challenging. People think, “Oh, there’s been a dozen AI detectors that sucked. Why should we believe yours is good?” he told me. Lately, he added, some Substackers have said the tool “consumes a bunch of water” and “vacuums up” their data. He disputes these claims. “It’s very easy,” he said, “to make up lies on the internet.”
Spero is particularly interested in how Pangram can be used to strengthen journalism. He has friends who are writers, he told me, and knows it’s a “rough industry where there’s so much pressure to do more with less.” In the past year, journalists writing for a range of publications, including the New York Times and Fortune, have admitted to using generative AI. Researchers at the University of Maryland, who used Pangram to analyze a hundred and eighty-six thousand articles published in fifteen hundred American newspapers in the summer of 2025, found that more than 9 percent contained AI text. The same study found AI-generated text in the opinion sections of the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
As generative AI use in writing becomes more common, so does a need for transparency and accountability, Spero told me. Pangram, he hopes, will help meet that need—and inspire journalists and publications to create guidelines around the use of generative AI. “Hopefully,” he said, “we’re doing our own small part to keep journalism human.”
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