Exclusive / Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users

In April, Reddit lawyers sent formal legal demands to the University of Zurich, whose researchers used AI to impersonate actual users in an experiment on the powers of AI persuasion. And states across the US are considering or passing new laws that require internet companies to verify the ages of their users.

As a result, there’s new urgency to find ways to verify some information about people online while also providing the privacy and anonymity that has become a cherished characteristic of the web.

Last month, Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman said AI and age verification laws would eventually force the company to check whether its users are human and of a certain age. Huffman said the company would work with third-party providers to avoid having to collect user information. “We will do our best to preserve both the humanness and anonymity of Reddit,” he wrote on the site.

When World ID users have their irises scanned by one of the company’s Orbs today, they still get free Worldcoins, which were worth just under a dollar a piece at the time this article was published.

But these days, it’s not the crypto component that makes Worldcoin a potentially important part of the AI industry. It’s the technology that can verify whether someone is a unique individual.

When Tools for Humanity was just getting started, it needed a way to prevent people from getting more than their share of Worldcoin. Otherwise, users could keep creating new accounts and receive an unlimited supply of the coin. But it also needed to do that without storing any personal information about users.

The system is sophisticated and complex, but somewhat easy to understand. The Orb scans a user’s iris, which is a one-of-a-kind biomarker like a fingerprint. It then creates an encrypted representation of the iris scan and breaks it up into fragments that are stored only on secret servers around the world, kind of like tearing up an impossible-to-decipher treasure map and hiding pieces of it in bank vaults around the globe.

In order to get hold of someone’s iris scan, a hacker would have to break into each of those servers, reconnect the fragmented data, and then reverse-engineer it back into the original iris scan. Even then, the hacker still wouldn’t know whose iris it was.

After the scan, users then get a unique World ID, which is stored in a locally encrypted vault on their smartphones.

World ID users can also verify their age and other credentials anonymously. If the Orb’s built-in age detection software suspects a user is under 18, it refuses to scan their irises.

It’s also possible to use the World app without using an Orb. But a World ID without Orb verification has limited functionality. It’s possible Reddit could accept logins with an unverified World ID, but would treat those accounts differently than fully verified ones. A pilot program allows users to verify credentials like passports with the World app by scanning it on the person’s local device, so no information is ever shared.

If Reddit does begin using World ID, it won’t be the only way to verify one’s humanity, according to the two people familiar with the matter. Users will have many options.

The number of online verification tools available to internet users are increasing rapidly and all offer various levels of privacy, security, and convenience, attributes that are sometimes at odds.

On Thursday, for instance, the Australian government published a report on the feasibility of its new internet age verification law. The report found there were many sufficient options, but no “single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments,” the report said.

One of the main drawbacks to every solution that exists today is that a person’s information must be stored somewhere in a world in which everything is hackable. Even an encrypted string of numbers stored inside a secure enclave on an iPhone has a major flaw: Account recovery. Phones can be lost or destroyed, so the information must be accessible without needing to hack the actual phone, making that method the weakest link.

There are some new and novel ideas that might provide a way around this challenge. A startup called Badge says it has found a way to do biometric authentication without storing any information about the person anywhere.

Whether World ID’s system catches on and succeeds will come down to trust.

That’s ironic, because the core concept is that you don’t need to “trust” Tools for Humanity with your personal data. You can read the company’s white papers and understand exactly how it all works.

But humans aren’t wired to think that way. Most people will want to trust the company scanning their irises. That’s a challenge for a company that takes a lot of licks in the press for its futuristic introduction of blockchain into the real world in the form of the metallic orbs.

The strangest part of the new urgency around verification, though, is that we’ve had the technology now for at least five or six years to verify that a person is real while also protecting their anonymity, and we have basically ignored it.

It’s odd to criticize social media companies for not doing enough to stamp out coordinated disinformation campaigns while not also advocating that the same companies adopt new technology that proves users are real, unique individuals.

Now, as more and more people verify their identities, whether it’s World ID or something else, non-verified accounts will start to stand out.

The other part of this is how this will fit into the many possible futures of the AI landscape. In one scenario, there are far more AI “agents” operating on the internet than humans. Humans will have to have some way to differentiate themselves and quickly present credentials for various tasks.

World ID could be well positioned to benefit in that scenario. But it’s also unlikely to be a winner-take-all market. Interoperability is a likely characteristic of the coming “agentic web” and that breeds more competition, or at least fair competition.

Time Magazine’s Billy Perrigo went deep on Tools for Humanity recently, and came to the conclusion that Altman could end up with too much power.

If the Internet is going to be transformed by AI agents, then some kind of proof-of-humanity system will almost certainly be necessary. Yet if the Orb becomes a piece of Internet infrastructure, it could give Altman—a beneficiary of the proliferation of AI content—significant influence over a leading defense mechanism against it. People might have no choice but to participate in the network in order to access social media or online services.