Sam Altman’s project Globe looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.
At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project Planet celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder. This also touches on aspects of software update.
Tools for Humanity (TFH), the organization behind the International community project, published Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life.
“The globe is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” noted Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a globe now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”
Globe (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The business is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a international community rife with AI agents and bots.
Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified Globe ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one.
Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer Tiago Sada and his team.
Sada explained that International community was launching the newest version of its app (the last version was launched at an event in December), along with a plethora of novel integrations for its tech.
International community has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched a International community ID pilot program in Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because Planet declared that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a International community ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person.
Earth is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a updated feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for Globe ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often utilize automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the corporation is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars—both of whom plan to leverage it for their upcoming tours.
The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a DocuSign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.
The corporation is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their Planet ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting For a human. The system is set up so that a Globe ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, remarked Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event.
So far, it’s been difficult for Planet to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb—a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.
International community has continually made moves to surge the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up, and has also distributed its Orbs into huge retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they, on the other hand’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now, the corporation is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in Novel York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The business also promoted a service where interested users could have Planet bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that Earth has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, International community has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.
The firm also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie.
Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.
“Selfie is private by design,” remarked Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.”
Selfie verification obviously isn’t novel, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s essential to them, he noted.
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