In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is blurring the lines between human and machine, a new technology is emerging to anchor our sense of humanity.

The Orb, a sleek, beach ball-sized sphere developed by Tools for Humanity, a company co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, promises to verify human identity through iris scanning.

As AI-generated content floods the internet, threatening the authenticity of online interactions, the Orb offers a radical solution: a biometric-based World ID to prove you’re human. But what does this audacious project mean for privacy, security, and the future of the internet?

The Orb is a futuristic device that captures the unique patterns of a user’s iris to create a 12,800-digit binary number known as an iris code. This code serves as a digital proof of humanity, stored securely in an app as a World ID.

Users who scan their irises also receive a small amount of Worldcoin cryptocurrency—approximately $42—as an incentive.

The technology, backed by Tools for Humanity, aims to address a pressing challenge: distinguishing humans from AI bots in an online world increasingly dominated by artificial agents.

As Sam Altman explained during a keynote in San Francisco, “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” referring to artificial general intelligence.

The stakes are high. In April 2025, Wikipedia’s foundation revealed that AI bots scraping their site were making operations unsustainably costly.

Meanwhile, a University of Zurich study found that AI-generated comments on Reddit’s /r/ChangeMyView were up to six times more persuasive than human-written ones.

These trends suggest that the internet’s core business model—online advertising, which assumes human viewers—could collapse without a reliable way to verify human users.

Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania warns, “The Internet will change very drastically sometime in the next 12 to 24 months. So we have to succeed, or I’m not sure what else would happen.”

The process is strikingly simple yet technologically sophisticated. A user stares into the Orb’s camera, which uses a telephoto lens to map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of their iris.

The device converts this image into an iris code, checks it against a database to ensure uniqueness, and then deletes the original data to protect privacy.

The iris code is split into derivative codes, encrypted, and distributed across secure servers, ensuring no single entity can reconstruct the original data.

When a user accesses a website with their World ID, the site confirms their humanity without accessing any personal information.

The Orb’s open-source design allows external experts to scrutinize its code, bolstering claims of transparency.

Trevor Traina, a former U.S. diplomat and Tools for Humanity advisor, stated, “I did a colonoscopy on this company and these technologies before I agreed to join,” affirming the robustness of its privacy measures.

However, not everyone is convinced. European Union regulators in Germany recently raised “fundamental data protection issues” with the Orb, demanding that users be allowed to delete even anonymized data—a decision Tools for Humanity is appealing.

For four years, Tools for Humanity has been testing the Orb in various countries, from South Korea to undisclosed locations abroad.

In a vivid scene described by TIME, elderly South Koreans in a Seoul suburb waited to be “verified” by Orbs, highlighting the device’s global ambitions.

With 12 million unique users already scanned, the project is gaining traction.

Yet, its rapid expansion raises ethical questions. Critics argue that offering cryptocurrency as an incentive could exploit vulnerable populations, while the collection of biometric data, even if anonymized, sparks concerns about surveillance and data misuse.

Altman dismisses fears of centralized control, emphasizing the World Protocol’s commitment to decentralization.

This underlying technology, which powers the Orb, Worldcoin, and World ID, is designed to be handed over to users over time, preventing power concentration.

Tools for Humanity plans to remain a for-profit entity, potentially charging fees to platforms using World ID, but encourages competition by allowing other companies to develop alternative apps or even Orbs.