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Sam Altman’s iris scan, Humanity Verification world Announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday, Tinder users around the world can now add a digital badge to their profiles to show potential suitors that they are a real person, provided they have their eye on one of the startup’s shiny white sphere and allowed their eyes to be scanned. Previously, World conducted a Tinder verification pilot program in Japan.
Tinder’s global expansion is one of World’s biggest tests yet The company’s bet Everyday consumers will be willing to sign up for biometric verification services to use web applications. Founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, Project World is designed to envision a future where the web is swarmed with powerful artificial intelligence agents, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to discern who is a real human. As companies like OpenAI (of which Altman serves as CEO) and Anthropic push artificial intelligence agents into the mainstream, the problems the world aims to solve are becoming increasingly urgent.
But World has struggled to achieve mainstream adoption and has faced resistance from governments around the world, which have investigated the company for alleged breaches of data protection laws. The company said 18 million people have now been verified by Orb, up from 12 million last year.
In addition to Tinder’s global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, also announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships at its “Lift Off” event in San Francisco on Friday. The startup says Tinder users who verify using World ID will get five free “boosts,” which is typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who view a profile by up to ten times in 30 minutes. Video conferencing platform Zoom also said that users can now require other participants to verify their identities to World before joining the call. Contract signing software Docusign will allow users to request World’s identity verification technology.
Tiago Sada, chief product officer of Tools for Humanity, told Wired that the company sees major platform partnerships as key to helping World become a mainstream identity verification technology. Sada said he is particularly interested in working with social media companies in the future and is pleased to see Reddit has begun test world As a solution to help users differentiate between bots and real people.
World has also launched a tool called Concert Kit that allows artists to book concert tickets for verified people, a move that directly targets the problem of bot-driven ticket scalping that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will be testing the feature during the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour starring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to perform a human-only verification show in San Francisco on Friday night under the pseudonym DJ Pee .Wee.
There were no new hardware announcements or updates released at Friday’s event. World first launched the iris scanning Orb in 2023, along with a mobile app that includes “mini-apps” for different verification and blockchain-related procedures. When a person scans their eyeballs with a world ball, the startup creates a unique encryption key for each person—their world ID. This creates a private, decentralized way to verify people’s identities online without requiring them to upload their government ID across the web.
The project was initially called Worldcoin, and in its early days the startup offered people free cryptocurrency for scanning their irises. World still offers cryptocurrency tokens and digital currency wallets, but dropped “coin” from its name in 2024 and has since shifted its focus to identity verification in the age of artificial intelligence. Tools for Humanity spokesperson Jess Montejano said the company still offers cryptocurrency as an incentive when new users sign up, but has also expanded its offerings to include Netflix and Apple TV subscription trials.
