✍🏽 Landon’s Loop #147
What’s in the Loop:
🎙️ Chicago Futurist Vol. 8 with Dan Neely, Founder & CEO of Vermillio
☢️ Illinois Announces 2033 Nuclear Strategy
📅 8 Events in Chicago This Week
🎙️ Chicago Futurist: Dan Neely, Founder and CEO of Vermillio
In 2018, a deepfake of Jay-Z singing Billy Joel went viral. It was taken down at his team’s request, then quickly restored. That was the moment it became clear the internet had changed.
As the tech advanced and the risks grew, Dan Neely founded Vermillio to meet the moment. Through its TraceID technology, his company is building guardrails for the generative internet, giving creators and everyday people control over their likeness in the AI era.
Vermillio is now one of the few Chicago companies named to the TIME100 Most Influential Companies list.
Here’s our conversation:
What surprised you most about how brands want to use AI likenesses once permission became possible?
DN: What surprised us is that brands want to put fans in control. Once proper guardrails are in place, brands and creators see AI as a co-creation tool. For example, we’re seeing musicians let fans create personalized versions of their songs.
The surprise isn’t just that personalization can happen at massive scale, but that when you have the right protections in place, creators are far more willing to let their fans play, remix, and build alongside them. Guardrails can unleash creativity.
What has working with top tier talent taught you that directly shaped the product?
DN: Working with top-tier talent opened our eyes to the scale of the issue but also how personal this problem can be. Talent have very differing opinions of what should stay and what should go, which can often be complex when building a great product. We realized we needed models that would constantly learn and create automated actions for each use case and variation across platforms.
Now it is agentic in its approach. Every day, leading talent have their likeness – image, voice, and more – exploited across the internet. We needed technology that proactively detected the abuses and automatically got rid of the unauthorized material. We’ve built battle-tested technology alongside some of the most powerful figures in entertainment.
TraceID is positioned as infrastructure, not just detection. What part of control over identity do creators care about most: attribution, consent, or compensation?
DN: Creators care about each of these. All creators start with consent: they want to make sure they have guardrails in place protecting them so that they control the option to do something.
Then they want guardrails that can allow them to automate what can and cannot be done with their likeness by an AI platform. Attribution and compensation go hand in hand – they are the collective piece of the puzzle that allows this to be gigantic. For our customers we describe them as the 4 Cs – Consent, Credit (attribution), Compensation and Control (creator gets to define the uses).
Deepfakes started as a celebrity problem, but now they’re a societal one. What does success look like when your customer is no longer just talent, but everyone. In the future, will everyone need a “likeness” wallet the same way we now need password managers?
DN: The AI risks we initially identified for celebrities have democratized in the worst possible way. We’re seeing children being cyberbullied with deepfakes. We’re hearing tragic stories of elderly people falling victim to deepfake scams. We’re watching journalists – both national and local – have their images and voices manipulated and their work violated by AI systems they never consented to train.
We believe everyone should be in charge of their likeness. We’re proud to push for stronger likeness protections and offer tools like TraceID for free. We believe people deserve clear ownership of their biometric data, transparent policies that don’t require legal experts to interpret, real compensation when their likeness is used, and genuine control over how their identity is deployed in AI systems – enforced by technology that is independent from the distribution platforms.
You’ve built Vermillio in Chicago. What advantages has building here given you that people outside the Midwest underestimate. What does Chicago need?
DN: Beyond being a beautiful city, people underestimate the talent in Chicago. We have a wide range of business leaders, tech veterans, and creators. We also have great universities that attract brilliant people to do amazing research.
But Chicago also needs to break its mindset of “slow and steady wins the race.” It would also be great to see the government engage with AI in a new way. Chicago has a wealth of IP that can be licensed to model builders or even open source to create a rich AI opportunity.
We’re moving from an internet built on content to one built on models trained on people. At the highest level, how do you think the internet itself has to change to handle that shift
DN: The internet is moving from a distribution disruption (i.e. it’s easier to get access to the entire music catalogue) to product disruption (i.e. the fan co-creates at scale everywhere). This means we are no longer visiting sites or clicking on links – instead they come to us. Agents will do our looking and they will adjust based on facts we give them. For example, imagine if your health data fed your agent (all protected and controlled by you) and that health data determined the types of content that are best for you today. The algorithm then isn't centralized by seven big internet companies but rather adapts to seven billion versions for every human on the planet.
If you were starting Vermillio today from scratch, what would you build first and what would you ignore
DN: I would build guardrails first and only focus on agentic, proactive protection from day one – technology that detects and removes unauthorized AI-generated content automatically, not reactively. I would completely ignore trying to adapt old content identification systems like YouTube's ContentID. Those were built for distribution disruption – finding uploaded copies of existing content.
People should know that we believe AI protection is a human right, not a luxury. If we’re serious about empowering humanity in the AI era, we can’t limit our most important technology to those who can afford it.
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☢️ Nuclear is BACK
Illinois is repositioning itself for the next era of compute demand. Last week, Governor Pritzker announced an EO to jumpstart new nuclear development across our state.
The order directs state agencies to evaluate sites for new reactors or expansions, with a target of at least 2 GW of new clean nuclear capacity, enough to power up to 2 million homes.
Construction could begin by 2033, with a state report due in 150 days outlining siting, financing, regulatory structure, costs, and economic benefits.
The nuclear push is being positioned as a way to keep electricity affordable, reliable, and carbon free, while preserving our role as a net energy exporter.
