Sam Altman’s Iris Study, humanity-affirmation The world project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the world can now put a digital badge on their profile indicating to potential suitors that they are a real human, provided they have already viewed one of the World. Glossy white orbs and allow their eyes to be examined. The announcement follows a pilot verification project Tinder previously ran in Japan.
The international expansion of Tinder is one of the biggest experiments for the World, and company bet that everyday users will be willing to sign up for biometric authentication services to use internet applications. This World Project, founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, was created for a future where the Internet is full of highly capable AI agents, which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to know who is actually human. As companies like OpenAI—where Altman is CEO—and Anthropic are pushing AI agents into the mainstream, Global Problems was created to solve an increasingly urgent sense of urgency.
But Universal has struggled to achieve mainstream adoption, and has faced backlash from governments around the world that have investigated the company over alleged breaches of data protection laws. The company says 18 million people are now verified by Orb, up from 12 million last year.
In addition to Tinder’s global expansion, Tools for Humanity, the company behind Universal, announced a number of other user-business partnerships on Friday at its Lift Off event in San Francisco. The startup says Tinder users who verify with their World IDs will get five free “boosts,” typically a paid feature that increases the number of users who view 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 with World before joining a call. Docusign, a contract signing software, will allow users to require the World’s identity verification technology.
Tiago Sada, chief product officer of Tools for Humanity, tells WIRED that the company sees cross-platform partnerships as key to helping the world become the world’s leading identity verification technology. Sada said she is very interested in working with social media companies in the future, and was encouraged to see that Reddit has taken off. measure the Earth as a solution to help users distinguish bots from real people.
Universal is also launching a tool called Concert Kit, which allows artists to reserve concert tickets for verified humans, a call aimed squarely at the bot-driven headline problem that critics say has plagued sites like TicketMaster. The world will test the feature on the upcoming Bruno Mars World Tour featuring Anderson .Paak, who is scheduled to play a confirmed only human 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. The world launched the iris-scanning Orb for the first time in 2023, along with a mobile app that contains a “micro-app” for separate authentication and blockchain-related apps. After a person scans their eyeball with one of the World Orbs, the initiator creates a unique cryptographic key for each person—their World ID. This creates a private, decentralized way to authenticate people online, without requiring them to upload their government credentials to the internet.
The project was originally called Worldcoin, and in the early days the startup offered people free cryptocurrency to scan their irises. The world still offers cryptocurrency tokens and wallets for digital currencies, but it dropped “coin” from its name in 2024 and has since turned its focus to identity verification for the AI age. Jess Montejano, a spokesperson for Tools for Humanity, says the company still offers crypto as an incentive when new users sign up, but has also expanded its offerings to include Netflix and Apple TV subscription trials.
