Columbia Student’s AI Tool Lands Internships at Major Tech Firms, Raising Ethics Concerns
A Columbia University student claims to have used an AI tool to secure internship offers from prominent tech companies, including Amazon, Meta, and TikTok. The tool, called Interview Coder, was designed to help users navigate coding interviews.
Roy Lee, the Columbia student and creator of the tool, showcased his success in a series of posts. He shared evidence of offers from several tech companies. “Yes, I actually used Interview Coder to get an Amazon offer. Yes, I used to also run an account that taught people how to solve Leetcode questions,” Lee stated in a post on X.
Created by Columbia student Roy Lee, Interview Coder is an invisible application that helps one pass LeetCode interviews, which provide coding and algorithmic problems.
Lee also shared a screenshot from his LinkedIn profile reflecting summer internships at Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and Capital One, all starting in February 2025. He indicated his willingness to accept an internship if other offers were removed.
Lee even posted a YouTube video, purportedly showing him using Interview Coder to solve coding problems during a live LeetCode interview for Amazon. The video’s dissemination prompted a response from Amazon, a purported email sent to Columbia University which expressed concern over Lee’s conduct. The email stated, “Chungin, or Roy as he prefers, recently interviewed for our Amazon SDE Intern role in which he proved to be a strong candidate. Soon after, I received a link to a YouTube video created by Roy in which he showed himself using an invisible cheating tool to gain an unfair and unapproved advantage during the interview process. While this is disturbing enough, further research showed that Roy is selling this tool to other students and engineers, spreading the tool to many users.”
HT.com has not independently verified the authenticity of this information.
Lee, in response, stated that he had already declined the Amazon offer and had no intention of working at the company. “Point of the software is to hopefully bring an end to Leetcode interviews. This tool took me a week to build and a better engineer could’ve built it in half a day,” he said.
Lee’s aim was to challenge the LeetCode interview process; he was not specifically interested in interning at any of the organizations. In his latest post, Lee shared a screenshot of an email from Meta that rescinded his internship offer. The email read, “Hi Roy. Following up from our phone conversation to confirm your offer of employment at Meta has been rescinded effective immediately. Thank you for your interest.”
