Sam Altman’s eye-scanning ID initiative debuts in the U.S. across six locations.

Worldcoin co-founders Sam Altman and Alex Blania.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s eye-scanning venture officially makes its U.S. debut Thursday. Altman co-founded “World” in 2019 — known as Worldcoin until last year — to create a global identity verification system for individuals, using iris scans and blockchain technology to combat fraud and bots.

Here’s how it works: You approach an Orb, a spherical biometric device, which takes about 30 seconds to scan your face and iris. It then generates and stores a unique “IrisCode” for you, verifying that you’re a human and that you haven’t registered previously. In return, you receive some of the project’s cryptocurrency, WLD, and can use your World ID as a sign-in for integrated platforms, which currently include Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify, and Discord.

Starting Thursday, the company is launching six flagship U.S. retail locations where individuals can get their iris scanned: Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Miami, and San Francisco.

At an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, the venture announced two notable partnerships: Visa will introduce the “World Visa card” this summer, exclusively for those who have had their irises scanned by World, and Match Group will pilot World ID and age verification tools with Tinder in Japan.

James Spediacci of San Francisco gets his eye scanned with the Orb device at the “At Last” event hosted by the World Network in San Francisco on April 30, 2025.

World’s “At Last” event at Fort Mason — featuring a performance by singer and rapper Anderson .Paak — included a live demonstration following a keynote by World Network co-founders Blania and Altman. The demo, which initially encountered some issues due to stage lights, illustrated how to pair the Orb with smartphones. At one point, the presenter had to remove his glasses for the Orb to capture his face more clearly.

“We wanted to ensure that humans remained special and central in a world increasingly filled with AI-driven content,” Altman stated during the keynote.

In response to reporters’ questions from around the globe, Blania described the current challenges posed by AI bots and deepfake technologies as a “wake-up moment for proof of human.” Although Altman, who is also the CEO of OpenAI, spoke at the event, a representative for OpenAI indicated that no integration is currently planned.

Blania expressed openness to future partnerships, stating, “We will share news as it becomes available.”

World’s mission has faced scrutiny from some governments, with Hong Kong regulators previously requesting the project to halt all data collection operations last year. One of the controversies surrounding World involves data storage. The project retains some personal data to prevent fraud and ensure that people do not double-scan or deceive the system. However, both investors and team members affirm that the data is decentralized and nearly impossible to reverse-engineer—unlike typical anonymized data, which can potentially be de-anonymized.

Anna Martins, a venture investor from Brazil, scans her iris at World’s event in San Francisco on April 30 to announce the launch of six U.S. retail locations for iris scans.

Adrian Ludwig, chief information security officer at Tools for Humanity, a key contributor to World, shared in an interview that the project distributes individuals’ stored data among various entities, including several financial institutions and blockchain platforms. “We were notably concerned about incidents like the Panama Papers breach, so we ensure that sensitive data is not held in a single location. We distribute it across multiple organizations and employ cryptography for security. Compromising all of them simultaneously would be necessary to access the data,” Ludwig explained.

The Orb eye-scanning device displayed at World Network’s “At Last” event in San Francisco on April 25, 2025.

Since its inception, Tools for Humanity — the Altman-founded startup driving the World project — has raised over $140 million from various investors, which has led to a valuation of $1 billion as of 2021. So far, 26 million individuals are part of the network across Europe, South America, and the Asia-Pacific region, with 12 million verified. The goal is to scale to one billion people, although progress has been slower than anticipated; originally, the aim was to reach that number by 2023.