Gates, who is Bill Gates’ daughter, founded the app alongside Sophia Kianni.
Kimberly White/Getty Images
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.
