Sam Altman’s eye-scanning ID project launches in 6 U.S. cities

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman‘s eye-scanning venture officially makes its U.S. debut Thursday.

Altman co-founded “World” in 2019 — known as Worldcoin until last year — to create a global identity verification system for people, using iris scans and the blockchain to ideally fight against fraud and bots.

Here’s how it works: You go up to an Orb, a spherical biometric device, and it spends about 30 seconds scanning your face and iris, then creates and stores a unique “IrisCode” for you verifying that you’re a human and that you’ve never signed up before. Then you get some of the project’s cryptocurrency, WLD, for free, and you can use your World ID as a sign-in with integrated platforms, which currently include Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify and Discord.

Starting Thursday, the company is opening six flagship U.S. retail locations where people can sign up to have their eyeball scanned: Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Miami and San Francisco.

At an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, the venture announced two high-profile partnerships: Visa will introduce the “World Visa card” this summer, available only to people who have had their irises scanned by World, and the online dating giant Match Group will begin a pilot program testing out World ID and some age verification tools with Tinder in Japan.

World’s “At Last” event in Fort Mason — which featured a performance by singer and rapper Anderson .Paak — included a live demo following a keynote by World Network co-founders Alex Blania and Altman. The demo, which got off to a slightly slow start due to some interference from the stage lights, showed the audience how to pair the Orb to their phones, and at one point the person doing the demo had to take off his glasses so the Orb could see his face a little more clearly.

“We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central, in a world where the internet was going to have lots of AI-driven content,” Altman said during the keynote.

Answering questions from reporters who flew in from all over the world for the event, Blania called the current challenges from AI bots and deepfake technologies a “wake up moment for proof of human.”

Although Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, spoke at the event on Wednesday, a representative for the company said an integration with OpenAI wasn’t in the works at the moment.

Blania told reporters that he was open to the idea of a partnership, adding that “we will share news when we have them.”

World’s mission has been questioned by some governments and Hong Kong regulators asked the project to cease operation of all data collection last year.

One of the controversies surrounding World relates to data storage.

The project keeps some personal data for fraud purposes, to make sure that people aren’t double-scanning or tricking the system. But investors in the project, as well as its team members, say that data is decentralized and impossible to reverse-engineer — unlike typical anonymized data, which it is possible to de-anonymize and identify someone with.

Adrian Ludwig, chief information security officer at Tools for Humanity, a core contributor to World, said in an interview that the project splits up individuals’ stored data among multiple parties, such as a “couple of different financial institutions” and some blockchain institutions.

“The way I always think about it is we were very surprised when the Panama Papers got broken into and they got leaked,” Ludwig said. “We’re concerned about that kind of situation, and so we don’t have a single place that has all the sensitive data. We split it up across multiple different companies and organizations that are holding it, and we use cryptography to keep it separate. You’d have to compromise all of them simultaneously.”

Since its founding, Tools for Humanity — the Altman-founded startup behind the World project — has raised upwards of $140 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase and billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, giving the firm a $1 billion valuation as of 2021, the most recent year for which the valuation is available.

So far there are 26 million people on the network across Europe, South America and the Asia-Pacific region, with 12 million verified, according to a representative for World, who added that its goal is to scale to one billion people. It’s moving slower than expected, though: In 2021, the project’s goal was to scale to one billion people by 2023.

— CNBC’s Riya Bhattacharjee contributed reporting from San Francisco