Arena's CEO says his company has encountered job applicants who seem too good to be true — literally.

Anastasios Angelopoulos said that the AI-model evaluation company he cofounded has interviewed candidates who turned out to be AI rather than real people.

"They're passing all of our technical interviews," Angelopoulos said in an interview on the "20VC" podcast that aired on Monday.

"And then what happens at the end of it? You try to hire them, and it's vaporware," he added, referring to an industry term for a product that never materializes.

He described the applicants as "fake people applying to companies," adding that Arena's engineers had interviewed the candidates and believed they were real.

"This person wasn't real. It was AI," he said.

Angelopoulos did not say how Arena had determined the applicants were AI-generated.

He said he did not know who was behind the bogus applications, but raised the possibility of corporate espionage, cyberattacks, or attempts to access company data and code.

Arena didn't immediately reply to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The rise of fake candidates

Angelopoulos said fake candidates were pushing Arena to consider requiring new hires to complete onboarding in person.

"If you want a laptop, you got to come to the office. We got to go and shake your hand. We got to verify that you're real," Angelopoulos said.

"People are trying to get into all of the American businesses," Angelopoulos added. "We're not the only ones. This is happening everywhere."

It's not the first time US companies have confronted fake job candidates involving AI, although the scale can vary from individual scammers to coordinated nation-state schemes.

In a 2025 alert, the FBI warned that North Korean IT workers had used AI and face-swapping technology in video interviews to conceal their identities and secure remote roles at US companies.

The bureau said some workers then used unlawful access to steal proprietary and sensitive data after obtaining employment with more than 100 US companies.

It urged employers to verify identities during interviews and onboarding — ideally in person — and to continue checks throughout remote workers' employment.

Several tech companies have since moved to block bogus job applications. Coinbase required all workers to come to the US for in-person orientation, while Amazon has used AI to screen and block applications from suspected North Korean agents.

While the exact number of companies facing fake AI job candidates is unclear, Gartner, a technology research and advisory firm, found in a second-quarter 2025 survey of 3,000 job candidates that 6% admitted taking part in interview fraud — either posing as someone else or having someone else pose as them in an interview.

Gartner said it expects one in four candidate profiles worldwide to be fake by 2028.