Staring at Sam Altman’s orb now proves you’re a Tinder guy

Sam Altman’s iris scan, The Global Humanity Verification Project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the world can now put a digital badge on their profiles, signaling to potential suitors that they’re real people, provided they’ve already stared into one of the world’s shiny white orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a Tinder verification pilot that World previously ran in Japan.

Tinder’s global expansion is one of its biggest tests yet for the world, and the company hopes that everyday users will be willing to sign up for biometric verification services to use internet apps. Founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, Project World is designed for a future where the Internet is overpopulated with highly capable AI agents that make it incredibly difficult, 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 created to solve feels increasingly urgent.

But World has struggled to gain 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 says 18 million people have already checked in with 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 its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World ID will get five free « boosts, » a typically paid feature that increases the number of users who see a profile up to 10 times in 30 minutes. Video conferencing platform Zoom also says users can now require other participants to verify their identity with World before joining a conversation. Docusign, the contract signing software, will allow users to claim the world’s most powerful identity verification technology.

Thiago Sada, Chief Product Officer of Tools for Humanity, tells 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 was encouraged to see that Reddit has begun testing World as a solution to help users distinguish between bots and real people.

World is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which allows artists to reserve concert tickets for verified people, an idea aimed squarely at the bot-driven scalping problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. World will test the feature on Bruno Mars’ upcoming world tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a vetted-only show under his DJ Pee .Wee moniker in San Francisco on Friday night.

No new hardware announcements or updates were made at Friday’s event. World first launched the iris-scanning Orb in 2023, along with a mobile app that contains “mini-apps” for various blockchain-related verifications and programs. After a person scans their eyeball with 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 upload their government ID anywhere on the internet.

The project was originally called Worldcoin, and in the early days the startup offered people free cryptocurrency for scanning their irises. World still offers a cryptocurrency token and digital currency wallet, but dropped the « coin » from its name in 2024 and has since shifted its focus to identity verification for the AI ​​age. Jess Montejano, a spokesperson for Tools for Humanity, says 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 trial subscriptions.