Sam Altman’s best known as the CEO of OpenAI. Less well-known is his second passion, which involves eyeballs. Through his side venture, World (formerly Worldcoin), he wants people to peer into a metallic sphere called an Orb, which scans their iris and issues a digital credential known as a World ID. The idea’s simple enough. As AI makes it harder to tell humans from machines online, World aims to prove you're a real person. It even pays for the privilege. Stare into the Orb, and a handful of crypto tokens land in your wallet.
Six American cities host the Orb. Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville and San Francisco. The company wants thousands of them in gas stations and corner shops over the next few years. Each scan buys you crypto and a permanent slot in a private biometric database. Altman owns the database.
Here are the obvious problems. Passwords change. Cards cancel. Your iris does neither. The pattern in your eye holds from your first breath to your last. Once a company logs it, the logging’s permanent. A breach of a password file wrecks a weekend. The breach of an iris file could wreck a person’s life.
The man selling proof of humanity also builds the machines that fake it. OpenAI floods the internet with synthetic faces and cloned voices, and then sets up a chrome orb on the sidewalk and asks you to prove you’re not one of them. He pollutes the well and sells the bottled water. He sets the fire and sells you the extinguisher. That’s a fascinating business model. It’s also a frightening one.
The rest of the world already ran the experiment. Kenya suspended the project in August 2023, and then its High Court declared the operation illegal in May 2025. Brazil blocked payments for scans and threatened daily fines. Germany ordered the company to delete its biometric data. Hong Kong sent inspectors to six sites and shut the operation down. Spain froze the scans. Indonesia suspended the local arm in May 2025 over licensing breaches. A few months later, the Philippines issued a cease-and-desist.
That’s a long line of governments reaching the same verdict. They saw a private company hoarding the iris patterns of their citizens and said no. Americans got a different answer. The pitch arrived with Tinder, Zoom, and DocuSign signing partnership deals. The governments that protected their citizens treated the Orb as a threat. The country selling it to its citizens calls it innovation.
The reason America became the test market is dull but damning. Most states have no law protecting your biometric data. Illinois has one with actual substance. Texas and Washington have weaker versions. Forty-odd states have nothing. The Orb landed in Austin and Atlanta because the company could scan a Texan or a Georgian with little fear of the fines that chased it out of Africa, Asia, and South America.
Some readers will say they will never scan their eyes, so the problem is someone else's. That holds as long as the scan remains optional.
The trouble lives in the word "verify." World wants to become the layer that decides who counts as human online. Banks want it. The dating apps already signed on. Add government portals, airline check-ins, and job applications, and the opt-out vanishes.
You can refuse a product, but it’s more difficult to refuse the plumbing. Nobody passes a law making a World ID mandatory. The machines just stop accepting anything else. Stack enough of those checks, and the credential stops being a convenience and becomes a key to the gate. Lose the key, and you lose access to the modern economy.
The first people to opt out become the first people locked out. Those pushed through the Orb first are the ones who need the token payment most. That’s the pattern that got the company banned for preying on the poor abroad.
Picture the breach that follows. A database of 18 million irises is the prize every hacker wants. No firewall lasts forever. When that file leaks the victims reset nothing. Their faces become passwords stamped across every black-market server for the rest of their lives. The company says it stores a hash, not a photo. Reassuring, until you recall that every breached firm offered the same comfort the week before the leak. Identity theft used to cost you a credit card. The next version costs you a face.
There’s the matter of trust handed to one founder. Altman sits closer to the levers of American technology than almost anyone alive. Give that man the registry of who does and doesn’t qualify as human, and a single person gains real leverage over public life.