4 min readNew DelhiJun 10, 2025 10:32 AM IST
First published on: Jun 9, 2025 at 02:40 PM IST
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s other venture, World, is all set to enter the United Kingdom this week with its biometric identity verification services starting to roll out in London from Thursday, June 12, followed by an expansion to Manchester, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, and Glasgow over the next few months.
World scans people’s eyes using a spherical eye-scanning device called the Orb. The technology is primarily designed to serve as an alternative authentication method to existing bot prevention measures such as CAPTCHA and facial recognition.
The company recently opened up shop in the US with retail stores in six locations including Austin, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Nashville, Miami, and San Francisco. World currently has over 13 million verified users with plans to scale services amid the AI era.
What are World’s Orbs?
Formerly known as WorldCoin, World is based on the belief that it will eventually be impossible to distinguish humans from AI bots on the Internet. Its Orb device aims to prevent the misuse of AI-generated deepfakes by scanning a person’s face and iris.
It then generates a unique code that could serve as an ID for authentication confirming that the individual is human and not AI.
Users who opt to have their iris scanned and receive their verified IDs will also be awarded with some amount of World’s WLD cryptocurrency token. An individual can also use their World ID to sign into various applications. Currently, it works with Reddit, Discord, and Minecraft.
Since its launch in 2021, World has been plagued by privacy concerns. However, the startup has said that it looks to address these concerns by encrypting the biometric data it collects from users and deleting the original data. World’s verification system is also built on a decentralised network comprising users’ smartphones, which is said to be safer than storing and processing biometric data via the cloud.
What are its applications?
The startup’s Orb technology is reportedly seeing significant demand from enterprise users as well as government clients. This demand has been spurred by the growing threat of AI for fraudulent purposes such as financial scams targeting bank customers, etc.
“The idea is no longer just something that’s theoretical. It’s something that’s real and affecting them every single day,” Adrian Ludwig, chief architect of Tools for Humanity, a core contributor to World, was quoted as saying by CNBC. He also revealed that World is in talks with regulators such as the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which serves as the data protection authority in the country.
“We’re beginning to see governments now more interested in how can we use this as a mechanism to improve our identity infrastructure. Mechanisms to identify and reduce fraud is of interest to governments,” Ludwig said.
“In general, there’s been lots of questions: how do we make sure this works? How do we protect privacy? If we engage with this, does it expose us to risks? All of those questions we’ve been able to answer,” he added.
The Orb, from startup World, an eyeball scanner that provides you with a “World ID,” at an event in San Francisco, April 30, 2025. (Jason Henry/The New York Times) 
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