Since 2019, the project has raised 244 million from investors like Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. That money paid for the 50 million cost of designing the Orb, plus maintaining the software it runs on. The total market value of all Worldcoins in existence, however, is far higher--around 1.2 billion. That number is a bit misleading: most of those coins are not in circulation and Worldcoin's price has fluctuated wildly. Still, it allows the company to reward users for signing up at no cost to itself.

Last year, a foundation called Tools for Humanity went on tour to show off its eye-scanning Orb. The metallic globe--an actual, physical orb--was one part of a process where citizens would someday use their biometric information to verify their humanity. The project, called Worldcoin, might have been written off as another techno-utopian project bound to fail had it not had one name attached to it: 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.

AI-enabled tools have become sophisticated enough to allow a small number of individuals to run disinformation campaigns of an unprecedented scale. Privacy-preserving identity attestations can drastically reduce instances of impersonation and make disinformation easy to identify and potentially hinder. By understanding how identity attestations are positioned across the spectrum of decentralization, we can gain a better understanding of the costs and benefits of various attestations. In this paper, we discuss attestation types, including governmental, biometric, federated, and web of trust-based, and include examples such as e-Estonia, China's social credit system, Worldcoin, OAuth, X (formerly Twitter), Gitcoin Passport, and EAS. We believe that the most resilient systems create an identity that evolves and is connected to a network of similarly evolving identities that verify one another. In this type of system, each entity contributes its respective credibility to the attestation process, creating a larger, more comprehensive set of attestations. We believe these systems could be the best approach to authenticating identity and protecting against some of the threats to democracy that AI can pose in the hands of malicious actors. However, governments will likely attempt to mitigate these risks by implementing centralized identity authentication systems; these centralized systems could themselves pose risks to the democratic processes they are built to defend. We therefore recommend that policymakers support the development of standards-setting organizations for identity, provide legal clarity for builders of decentralized tooling, and fund research critical to effective identity authentication systems.

In the past year or so, since the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT, people have been making their peace with the idea that an omnipotent AI might be on the horizon. Sam Altman, the company's CEO, "believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships," my colleague Ross Andersen reported after the two had several conversations. "ChatGPT was a way of serving notice." But OpenAI isn't Altman's only project, and it's not even his only project with ambitions to change the world. He is also a co-founder of a company called Tools for Humanity, which has the lofty goal of protecting people from the economic devastation that may arise from AI taking human jobs. The company's first major project is Worldcoin, which uses an evil-looking metallic orb--called the Orb--to take eyeball scans from people all over the world.

The news: Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool which labels whether pictures have been generated with AI. The tool, called SynthID, will allow users to generate images using Google's AI image generator Imagen, then choose whether to add a watermark. Watermarking--a technique where you hide a signal in a piece of text or an image to identify it as AI-generated--has become one of the most popular policy suggestions to curb harms. These new tools could help protect our pictures from AI. PhotoGuard and Glaze are just two new systems designed to make it harder to tinker with photos using AI tools. The finding could strengthen artists' claims that AI companies are infringing their rights.

It's a project that claims to use cryptocurrency to distribute money across the world, though its bigger ambition is to create a global identity system called "World ID" that relies on individuals' unique biometric data to prove that they are humans. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and one of the biggest tech celebrities right now, is one of the cofounders of the project, which launched on July 24 in more than 20 countries. But it's already being investigated in at least four jurisdictions around the world. Read our story to find out why. This story is from The Technocrat, Tate Ryan-Mosley's weekly newsletter all about tech, policy and power.

It's a project that claims to use cryptocurrency to distribute money across the world, though its bigger ambition is to create a global identity system called "World ID" that relies on individuals' unique biometric data to prove that they are humans. It officially launched on July 24 in more than 20 countries, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and one of the biggest tech celebrities right now, is one of the cofounders of the project. The company makes big, idealistic promises: that it can deliver a form of universal basic income through technology to make the world a better and more equitable place, while offering a way to verify your humanity in a digital future filled with nonhuman intelligence, which it calls "proof of personhood." If you're thinking this sounds like a potential privacy nightmare, you're not alone. Luckily, we have someone I'd consider the Worldcoin expert on staff here at MIT Technology Review.

Over the past few months, shiny metallic orbs have materialized cities around the world, from New York to Berlin to Tokyo. Its detractors slam them as invasive, dystopian and exploitative. Welcome to the rollout of Worldcoin, an AI-meets-crypto project from OpenAI founder Sam Altman that has stirred endless controversy. The startup uses orbs to scan people's eyes in exchange for a digital ID and possibly some cryptocurrency, depending on what country they live in. Altman and his co-founder Alex Blania hope that Worldcoin will provide a new solution to online identity in a digital landscape rife with scams, bots and even AI imposters.

Worldcoin wants to prove I am "actually human". At least that is the explanation a staff member gives for a cryptocurrency venture scanning my eyeball in a London office building. Without the optical scan, Worldcoin will not verify your "humanness" – you could be a robot and you won't get any crypto. Welcome to financial security in the age of artificial intelligence. Concerns have been voiced about the privacy implications of Worldcoin, which was co-founded by Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

Technologist and researcher Aviv Ovadya isn't sure that generative AI can be governed, but he thinks the most plausible means of keeping it in check might just be entrusting those who will be impacted by AI to collectively decide on the ways to curb it. That means you; it means me. It's the power of large networks of individuals to problem solve faster and more equitably than a small group of individuals might do alone (including, say, in Washington). In Taiwan, for example, civic-minded hackers in 2015 formed a platform -- "virtual Taiwan" -- that "brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy," as explained in 2019 by Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tang in the New York Times. Since then, vTaiwan, as it's known, has tackled dozens of issues by "relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders," Tang wrote at the time.