The ambitious identity-verification project Worldcoin, now called World, wants a future where humans are “orb-verified.”

Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, one of the most dramatic tech companies of the modern era. An inkling of Worldcoin began in 2019 when Altman began exploring identity verification that could be used in universal basic income schemes.

He teamed up with technologist Alex Blania to turn the idea into a reality. In a world of rapidly advancing AI, they theorized, it would be important for a human to prove they were not a bot. The answer they came up with relied on individuals using iris-scanning tech to generate private tokens that would verify their identities around the world.

Worldcoin, then, is the ultimate attempt at tech solutionism: A human-grade AI world that Altman is building might also be technologically regulated by a tool that Altman has his hands in.