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Zac Brown Band surprises 37,000 Fenway Park concert fans with free cruises

▶ Watch Video: Zac Brown Band gives free cruise to every fan at Fenway Park concert

Zac Brown Band celebrated their 15th straight sold-out concert at Fenway Park in Boston Sunday night with a huge surprise. Everyone in the audience got a free vacation on a cruise ship.

More than 37,000 fans at the concert were given a free cruise for two aboard Margaritaville at Sea.

According to the band, the total cost of the gift is more than $40 million – all paid for by Brown.

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Zac Brown gave everyone at his Fenway Park show on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2026, a free cruise vacation for two.

Zac Brown Band/AEG Presents IT

Brown broke the news to the crowd just before their performance of “Same Boat.”

“I’m buying every single person here a cruise for two people on the boat. Every single person here gets a cruise for themselves and a loved one to go on the boat,” he said in a video provided by the band. “This is the biggest giveaway in history, ladies and gentlemen, here tonight at Fenway Park!”

“We were honored to work alongside Zac to help bring this incredible surprise to life for his fans,” Christopher Ivy, chief executive officer of Margaritaville at Sea, said in a statement. “This was an extraordinary way to thank the fans who have supported him throughout his career, and we’re proud to have helped make that incredible vision a once-in-a-lifetime reality.”

The cruise gifts can be redeemed on “select Margaritaville at Sea sailings over the next year,” according to the company.

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More than 37,000 Zac Brown Band fans at Fenway Park got a free cruise vacation on Sunday, Aug. 2, 2026.

Zac Brown Band/AEG Presents IT

Fans who were at the show were shocked when they got the free cruise.

“At the beginning of the show, Zac Brown announced that there was going to be this amazing surprise that was taking place during the concert,” said Serina Ryder, who was at the show with her three sons. She thought the band would be bringing out a surprise guest. “But I never thought when he announced that he would be giving away a free cruise to every single person in the audience that we would be getting that kind of gift.”

Nathan Whitcomb was at the concert with his girlfriend and his parents. “I was like, ‘is he serious?’ I didn’t believe it, it didn’t seem real,” Whitcomb said. “It was unbelievable. Something so generous and it was just amazing. I’m still speechless. I woke up this morning, and I still couldn’t believe it.”

“This was definitely an amazing surprise that we weren’t, nobody was anticipating,” Ryder said. 

The band has been giving away four cruises at each show on this current tour in a promotion with Margaritaville at Sea.

Zac Brown Band played their first show at Fenway Park back in 2014. 

OpenAI introduces ‘ChatGPT for Teens’ experience amid scrutiny over child safety

New York (CNN) — OpenAI is rolling out a new “ChatGPT for Teens” experience that it says will provide additional safety protections for teen users. The move comes as OpenAI faces a string of lawsuits alleging that inappropriate conversations with ChatGPT contributed to the harm or deaths of young people.The experience will bring together new tools and a number of youth safety protections that OpenAI has rolled out over the past year, the company said in a blog post Tuesday. Those will include nudges for teen users to take a break if they’ve been active for 90 minutes within a three-hour window. OpenAI is also adding options for teens or parents to set “Quiet Hours” when ChatGPT is unavailable or “Study Hours” where ChatGPT’s study mode for learning will be on by default.The company also said it has improved protections to prevent ChatGPT from expressing personal feelings toward a user. And it’s adding reminders that caution teens to think twice if they try to upload a private or sensitive image to the chatbot.The new protections will apply “age-appropriate safeguards designed to reduce exposure to content that may be harmful or developmentally inappropriate,” the company said in its Tuesday blog post,” while preserving the ability to learn, create, and explore.”Users who identify at sign-up that they are under 18 will be automatically placed into the protective settings. OpenAI also says it’s using AI to estimate users’ ages and will apply these protections to users who are suspected to be under 18 regardless of the birthdate in their profile.Nearly a third of American teens use AI chatbots daily, a Pew Research Center study published in December found. ChatGPT was by far the most popular AI chatbot in the survey, with more than half of those teens reporting having used it.OpenAI has faced scrutiny over concerns that ChatGPT risks exposing young people to inappropriate content, exacerbating loneliness or inhibiting learning. The company has faced multiple lawsuits from families who allege that ChatGPT contributed to, or even encouraged, their child’s suicide. The company has pushed back on these allegations.Last fall, OpenAI introduced controls that it said would let parents disable ChatGPT features like memory and chat history and receive notifications when the system detects “a moment of acute distress” during their child’s use of the chatbot. The company said on Tuesday that in the coming weeks, it will add alerts for parents related to eating disorders.Since then, the company has continued to face claims that ChatGPT is responsible for harming young people.Seven families of victims of a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in April. They allege that ChatGPT was complicit in the injuries or deaths of their children because the shooter allegedly had extensive chatbot conversations related to gun violence. Altman apologized to the families. In response to the lawsuit, the company said it had already strengthened its guardrails. In June, the state of Florida sued OpenAI and Altman, claiming that they failed to address ChatGPT’s safety risks for minors. The lawsuit accused ChatGPT of helping mass shooters, encouraging suicide, causing “public humiliation” getting minors addicted to a tool with “no parental oversight” and causing users to lose “critical thinking skills.” OpenAI said at the time that it had “put in place industry leading protections and policies.”Just last week, a Massachusetts district attorney charged a 17-year-old with two counts of murder in association with the deaths of his mother and brother. The teen had been engaged in conversations with ChatGPT about “theoretical ideas or fantasies regarding killing his family” in the lead-up to the incident, according to a news release from the DA’s office. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the case.CNN’s Hadas Gold contributed to this report.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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