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Last week, the New York Times published a laudatory profile<\/a> 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n As readers quickly pointed out<\/a>, 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<\/a> related to \u201cfalse and misleading\u201d marketing content, and didn\u2019t include any details about Medvi\u2019s ensnarement in multiple legal actions, which include an ongoing class action lawsuit against Medvi over alleged violations of California\u2019s spam laws. And as Futurism first reported on in May 2025<\/a>, 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 \u201cbefore-and-after\u201d pictures of fake \u201cMedvi patients.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, the NYT has appended a chunky editor\u2019s note to the story, acknowledging the issues and noting changes to the article.<\/p>\n \u201cAfter 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,\u201d reads the NYT\u2019s update. \u201cWe have updated the article to note a warning letter from the FDA and a pending class action lawsuit accusing Medvi of violating California\u2019s anti-spam law.\u201d<\/p>\n