Last week, the New York Times published a laudatory profile of a startup called Medvi, which is basically an AI-powered marketing wrapper for telehealth providers and compounding pharmacies that sells GLP-1 weight loss drugs. The twist, as the NYT reported, was that Medvi was started by just one guy, who still runs it with a skeleton crew; as such, the newspaper portrayed Medvi’s swift and lucrative rise as an AI-enabled success story, and declared the startup as the first one-ish person company on track to surpass one billion dollars in sales.
As readers quickly pointed out, though, the NYT either downplayed or omitted key details that cast Medvi in a much less flattering light. The piece failed to mention a warning from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over several alleged regulatory violations related to “false and misleading” marketing content, and didn’t include any details about Medvi’s ensnarement in multiple legal actions, which include an ongoing class action lawsuit against Medvi over alleged violations of California’s spam laws. And as Futurism first reported on in May 2025, the company also engaged in dishonest marketing tactics including claiming that it had partnered with a doctor who told us he had no involvement with the company, and manipulating photos of random people online into “before-and-after” pictures of fake “Medvi patients.”
Now, the NYT has appended a chunky editor’s note to the story, acknowledging the issues and noting changes to the article.
“After this article was published, many readers noted that Medvi was facing legal and regulatory actions for its business practices. Our piece should have included that information to give readers a fuller picture of the scrutiny that the company was facing,” reads the NYT’s update. “We have updated the article to note a warning letter from the FDA and a pending class action lawsuit accusing Medvi of violating California’s anti-spam law.”
Medvi, meanwhile, has since released a statement in response to the public scrutiny that followed the NYT’s story. The company largely blamed its woes on uncouth affiliate marketers, and failed to answer our follow-up questions about its alleged compliance failures and deceptive marketing practices.
More on the Medvi fallout: AI-Powered Drug Marketer Medvi Responds After Allegations About Fake Doctors and Patients
The post New York Times Makes Substantial Changes to Article That Glazed a Sleazy AI Startup: “Our Piece Should Have Included That Information” appeared first on Futurism.
