Sam Altman’s iris scanning, On Friday, at an event in San Francisco, it was announced that Tinder users around the world can now add a digital badge to their profiles, signaling to potential suitors that they are a real person, provided they have already looked into one of the world’s shiny white orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a Tinder verification pilot project that World previously conducted in Japan.
Tinder’s global expansion is one of the biggest tests in world history and the company’s bet that ordinary consumers will be willing to sign up for biometric verification services to operate online applications. Founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, Project World was designed for a future in which the Internet is full of highly capable AI agents, making it extremely challenging, if not impossible, to tell who is truly human. As companies like OpenAI – where Altman is CEO – and Anthropic push AI agents into the mainstream, the problem the world was built to solve seems increasingly urgent.
However, World has struggled to gain mainstream adoption and has faced resistance from governments around the world, which have investigated the company over suspected breaches of data protection laws. The company says 18 million people have now been verified using Orb, up from 12 million last year.
In addition to Tinder’s global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind World, announced a number of other consumer and enterprise partnerships on Friday at the Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup claims that Tinder users who verify their profile using World ID will receive five free “add-ons,” a typically paid feature that increases the number of users viewing a profile by up to 10 times in 30 minutes. Video conferencing platform Zoom also says users can now require other participants to verify their identity on World before joining the call. Docusign, a contract signing software, will allow users to require global identity verification technology.
Tiago Sada, chief product officer at Tools for Humanity, tells WIRED that the company sees partnerships with major platforms as key to helping World become mainstream in identity verification technology. Sada said he is particularly interested in working with social media companies in the future and was encouraged by the fact that Reddit has started test world as a solution to facilitate users distinguish bots from real people.
World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which allows artists to book concert tickets for verified people. It’s a solution aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say plagues sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature during the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour with Anderson .Paak, who will play for verified people only on Friday night in San Francisco under the name DJ Pee .Wee.
No fresh announcements or hardware updates were made during Friday’s event. The world first released the iris-scanning Orb in 2023, along with a mobile app that includes “mini-apps” for various verification and blockchain-related programs. After a person scans their eyeball using one of the World Globes, the startup creates a unique cryptographic key for each person – their World ID. This creates a private, decentralized way to verify people online, without requiring them to transmit their ID across the Internet.
The project was initially called Worldcoin, and at the beginning the startup offered people a free cryptocurrency for iris scanning. World still offers a cryptocurrency token and digital currency wallet, but it dropped “coin” from its name in 2024 and has since focused on identity verification in the age of artificial intelligence. Jess Montejano, a spokesperson for Tools for Humanity, says the company still offers cryptocurrencies as an incentive to sign up fresh users, but has also expanded its offering to include Netflix and Apple TV subscription trials.