I tried the Sam Altman-backed orb face scanner. It couldn’t verify my humanity

By Clare Duffy, CNN

New York (CNN) — A Sam Altman-backed company has an ambitious plan to solve one of the internet’s trickiest problems — distinguishing humans from artificial bots.

It involves an Orb.

The Orb couldn’t verify me as a “unique human” when I tried it — but it turns out, that’s partially by design.

I wear blue-light blocking contacts with a slight yellow tint, so the Orb evidently thought I was trying to fool it by disguising my identity.

“Well, that’s sad, but I’m grateful that it rejected you,” Tiago Sada, chief product officer at the company behind the Orb, told me after the tool returned a message saying, “something is blocking your face.”

The Orb, built by Tools for Humanity, which Altman co-founded, wants to provide what it says is a more effective identity verification method in the age of artificial intelligence.

Now that AI systems can understand images, for example, it’s no longer just humans who can pick out the photos of school buses on traditional CAPTCHA systems. And cracking down on bots is crucial as fake accounts have become more prominent everywhere from ticket sales websites to dating apps. What’s more, armies of bots can be used to spread harassment or disinformation campaigns on social media, and AI scams are already proving costly for victimized families and companies.

“Every single time, for any artist around the world, tickets go live, bots go and buy tickets and they drive up the prices,” Sada said. “I’m on dating apps all the time, and probably every week I come across an account that I’m like, ‘Oh, why does this person have six fingers?’ Well, turns out it was an AI.”

Still, convincing large numbers of people to let a gleaming, sci-fi-looking Orb photograph their faces to confirm their humanity and enable bot-free online spaces may be a tall order.

Already, several places have banned the project over privacy and other concerns, including the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. And some critics say the Orb is part of an AI future being pushed by tech leaders like Altman that not everyone wants.

But Sada said he believes the need for the service is already apparent. “Every single website, whether it’s finance, social media, commerce, whatever, we think of proof of human is super relevant.”

How the Orb works

When a user scans their face with the Orb, the technology photographs their eyes and face to analyze things like dimension and how they react to light, Sada said.

When the Orb has verified a user’s “humanness,” it sends a unique code, or “WorldID,” to an app on their phone. The idea is that WorldID would serve as a sort of digital passport to verify users’ identities across a range of online services. It’s sort of like Face ID, but without requiring an iPhone and potentially applicable across more services.

Sada envisions, for example, that if a bank wanted to confirm a customer’s identity before divulging financial information, it could use your WorldID rather than security questions, which may be easier for a scammer to guess.

Currently, there are few practical use cases for WorldID. But it can be used in a limited fashion on some platforms, including Reddit and Shopify, where users can access “human-only” subreddits or retail deals, Sada said.

More than 12 million people have already verified their identity using Orbs, which are available and free to use in more than 20 countries at malls and other central locations or at Tools for Humanity events. Later this year, the company plans to roll out a service to deliver Orbs directly to people’s homes for easier verification, starting in Latin America.

The Orb is temporarily unavailable in the United States while the technology is being updated, but the company says it will re-launch “soon.” The World App is still available in the meantime.

Safety questions

Tools for Humanity built the Orb for the “World” network, an open-source platform that serves as a sort of repository for “verified” humans.

World users in some countries can buy and sell the “Worldcoin” cryptocurrency, a token only accessible to people on the network. The company has gifted some Orb users a bit of Worldcoin in exchange for photographing their faces. (CNN was not offered the cryptocurrency, which is not available in the United States, when testing the device.)

The network project launched as Worldcoin in 2023, before rebranding to just “World” last year, leaving the name of the token unchanged. Leaders said the effort could help manage the “economic implications” of AI; for example, by providing a means of delivering universal basic income, an idea of which Altman is a proponent.

For now, Tools for Humanity’s main source of revenue is selling or renting Orbs to World “community operators,” who earn extra Worldcoin in exchange for onboarding new users to the network, although the company said it’s exploring additional revenue streams.

As with many other cryptocurrency projects, Worldcoin has drawn extra scrutiny to the project. Some skeptics raised concerns that offering users cryptocurrency in exchange for using the technology could encourage them to overlook potential privacy risks. Others worried the project could centralize too much power under Altman, who already has an outsized role in what’s expected to be a revolutionary tech transformation.

Last fall’s rebrand was viewed as a likely effort to expand its identity beyond the original cryptocurrency effort.

Sada says Tools for Humanity says Worldcoin gives users ownership over the World network. Tools for Humanity did not respond to a request for comment on behalf of Altman, its chairman.

The Orb also faces ongoing scrutiny from privacy regulators in Europe and elsewhere, given that it works by collecting sensitive biometric data.

According to Tools for Humanity, photos taken by the Orb are sent to users’ phones along with their WorldID and then are automatically deleted from the device, so the company retains no biometric data. The data is encrypted en route to users’ devices, where users can set up the app to require authentication before opening it. The company has also open-sourced much of the technology behind the Orb, an effort, it says, to allow third parties to verify its safety claims.

“It’s not very intuitive that something like this is … private,” Sada said. “We think that privacy is freedom, and something like World exists first and foremost to defend people’s freedom.”

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