The Cheating Arms Race: When Startups Are Funded to Undermine Integrity

It really feels like we’re in the middle of an arms race between instructors and students right now.

In the past week alone, several conversations across faculty communities have centered on the same frustration: cheating is getting out of hand—and now we’re watching startups raise millions to make it even easier.

Case in point: This week, TechCrunch reported on a company called Cluely, whose founders—both suspended from Columbia University for academic dishonesty—just raised $5.3 million to scale a tool designed explicitly to help people “cheat on everything.” Their product offers a hidden in-browser assistant that guides users through exams, job interviews, even sales calls, without the person on the other side knowing.

Their manifesto? Comparing themselves to calculators and spellcheck. Their business model? Monetizing dishonesty. Their pitch video? Something straight out of Black Mirror.

Cheating is no longer the fringe behavior of a few desperate students—it’s being productized, funded, and normalized.

When Cheating Becomes the Default

What’s most alarming isn’t just that tools like Cluely exist. It’s that this mindset—cheating as the default—has become pervasive enough that investors are betting on it.

When cheating becomes the default, grading stops being about evaluating learning. It becomes punishment. And not just for the students—it becomes punishment for the instructors too.

No wonder so many of us have been retreating back to blue books and pen-and-paper exams. At least with paper, you know who wrote the words on the page.

But going backwards shouldn’t be the only option.

Fighting Back Without Lockdown Browsers or Surveillance

Like many of you, we’ve been watching this arms race unfold with a mix of frustration and urgency. Over the past year, we’ve been working on a different approach—one that doesn’t rely on lockdown browsers, intrusive video surveillance, or forcing students into unfamiliar environments.

We built Proctaroo to give instructors a way to confidently run digital exams while letting students work in the tools they actually learned—MATLAB, Excel, Python, R, Google Docs, and more.

But here’s the thing: the new wave of cheating tools, like Cluely, aren’t showing up on traditional proctoring radars. Their system uses a relatively new Apple feature that allows their AI assistant to operate in an invisible overlay—completely undetectable by standard lockdown browsers and proctoring solutions.

Proctaroo is currently the only solution that can detect this kind of hidden activity.
Our real-time monitoring picks up on suspicious behavior like invisible windows, hidden browser instances, and overlay exploits—exactly the kind of tactics Cluely is using to market “cheat on everything” as a service.

Our focus is simple:

• Verify authorship and integrity, without clunky lockdowns

• Detect hidden overlays and invisible cheating tools (including Cluely)

• Stay compatible with the real software instructors use to teach

No weird surveillance. No “big brother” vibes. Just proof that the work students submit is their own.

We know how exhausting this fight can feel. If you’re dealing with the same challenges and looking for a way to keep your exams digital—without giving up on integrity—we’d love to offer you free access to Proctaroo. No strings, just support.

And if you’ve found other creative ways to push back—rethinking assessment design, moving back to in-person, or otherwise—we’d love to hear from you. Because if startups are raising millions to flood the system with dishonesty, we need to be just as loud about defending what matters.