Lorde Calls Meta AI Glasses ‘Not Sexy’ at Mad Cool Festival

Pop star Lorde used her set at the Mad Cool Festival in Madrid on July 10, 2026 to publicly reject Meta's AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses, telling the crowd: "F the glasses. Don't get the glasses. Not sexy." The comments landed with extra sting given that Ray-Ban was a festival sponsor and Jennie, a Ray-Ban Meta ambassador, performed right after Lorde. Despite growing privacy concerns and active lawsuits, the product has not slowed: EssilorLuxottica reported more than 7 million units sold in 2025 alone.

What happened

Fact	Detail
Date of comments	July 10, 2026
Venue	Mad Cool Festival, Madrid
Festival sponsor	Ray-Ban (Meta AI glasses partner)
Performer after Lorde	Jennie, Ray-Ban Meta ambassador
2025 Meta AI glasses sales	More than 7 million units
2023 + 2024 combined sales	Roughly 2 million units

Lorde addressed the crowd between songs to express her discomfort with a technology she sees as blurring the line between the physical and the surveilled. “Increasingly in our world, it gets harder and harder to know what is real,” she said. “You don’t know if someone is wearing sunglasses, or if they’re wearing those f—ed up, f—ing [AI glasses].”

The timing was pointed. Ray-Ban, which produces the Meta AI glasses line in partnership with Meta, was a named sponsor of the festival. Jennie, who serves as a brand ambassador for those same glasses, took the stage immediately after Lorde finished her set.

Why it matters

Lorde’s remarks are not just celebrity noise. Smart glasses fitted with cameras and AI features have been used in documented cases of harassment and extortion. Meta says it takes privacy seriously and has built in a visible recording light as a safeguard, but the company is currently dealing with multiple investigations and lawsuits alleging privacy violations.

One active lawsuit makes a particularly serious claim: that Kenyan contract workers were required to watch graphic videos captured using the glasses as part of Meta’s AI training process. Meta has not publicly addressed that specific allegation.

None of this has put a dent in sales. EssilorLuxottica, the manufacturer behind the Ray-Ban brand, sold more than 7 million Meta AI glasses in 2025. That is more than triple the roughly 2 million units sold across all of 2023 and 2024 combined. Meta has continued to expand the product line on the back of that momentum.

For businesses thinking about AI adoption, the glasses story is a useful reminder that privacy concerns do not automatically suppress consumer demand. But they do generate legal exposure and reputational risk, especially as more lawsuits work their way through courts. If you are evaluating AI integration for your own operations, the compliance and liability angle deserves as much attention as the feature list.

Is the backlash actually affecting Meta AI glasses sales?

Not yet. The sales numbers suggest strong consumer appetite despite years of coverage about privacy risks. Kylie Jenner has been prominently featured promoting the glasses, and celebrity ambassadors like Jennie keep the product visible. One pop star’s festival rant is unlikely to move the needle on its own.

What could move the needle is regulatory action. Meta already faces multiple ongoing investigations. If any of those produce fines or restrictions on the recording features, the product calculus changes fast. We have been tracking similar patterns in AI hardware and video generation where sales surge ahead of regulation, then stall when enforcement catches up.

Our take

Lorde’s one-liner (“Not sexy”) is the most concise privacy critique the glasses have received, and probably the most widely shared. But the sales figures tell the real story: 7 million units in a single year means a lot of people either do not know about the privacy issues, or do not care.

For anyone running a business that involves events, retail spaces, or customer-facing environments, this matters now. You have no reliable way to tell whether a customer or employee is wearing ordinary sunglasses or a camera-equipped pair. That is not a hypothetical risk; it is already the daily reality in venues across Europe and the US.

The lawsuit alleging graphic content being used to train Meta’s AI is the thread most worth watching. If it proceeds, it could set a precedent for how data collected by consumer wearables can be used downstream, which has implications well beyond a pair of glasses.

What to do about it

1. Review your venue or workplace policy on recording devices. Most existing policies were written before camera-equipped glasses were common.
2. Check whether your privacy notice covers incidental capture by third-party wearables if you handle personal data in a regulated sector.
3. Follow the Meta investigations closely. Regulatory outcomes in the EU in particular tend to set the bar for what becomes enforceable globally.
4. If you are building or advising on AI products, document your data sourcing and training pipeline now, before a lawsuit forces the question.

The glasses are selling. The lawsuits are growing. The gap between those two facts is where the real business risk sits.

Source: TechCrunch · AI