Welcome to Sam Altman’s Orb Store

Just across from Union Square in the heart of San Francisco, you can find a room full of orbs.

The startup World (formerly Worldcoin) just announced its US expansion, with minimalist storefronts devoted to its flagship, eye-scanning orb now open in six cities. The company’s aim is to better identify humans in an age of advanced AI, where artificial trickery is becoming increasingly difficult to detect. Now, with an orb, you scan your eyeball, store that data on the blockchain, and confirm your “humanity” to make purchases, play video games, or (coming soon) sign up for dating apps.

The sleek San Francisco venue featured more PR staffers than actual customers on May 1, since orb-scanning is strictly appointment only. To be clear, you can’t buy the orbs at the store, which exists to give users access to World’s eye-scanning technology (and show off gadgets like the upcoming Orb Mini, an iPhone-sized device set to release next year). The centerpiece of the store was a plywood structure with eight orbs ready for customer use. Some of the people who’d booked early appointments encountered glitches when trying to scan their eyeballs, which seemed to perplex the contracted workers.

After squeezing past dozens of reporters and staff, I chatted with one well-dressed woman who was standing in front of an orb ready to get her eye scanned. She’d heard about the company through her husband, she said, and was in the middle of downloading her biometric data onto her phone.

The vibe at the store was similar to what I’d experienced at the launch party the night before, which had all the trappings of a highbrow tech event with the energy only a tech hype cycle can produce. At the party, Anderson .Paak performed a few unreleased tracks for attendees. A similar plywood fixture sat in the middle of the room, which was filled with bright lights, while the rest of the event center was cast in a dim blue. Most partygoers were snapping selfies with the orbs—the most Instagrammable objects in the room.

Back at the storefront, attendees clad in fitted blazers paired with spotless sneakers sipped cortados doled out by a friendly barista.

“You get mixed emotions,” says Kim Scott, who works for a recruiting agency that helps staff World. She’d scanned her eye at the party the night before. Scott said she was “ambivalent” about partaking in the orb experience, but after successfully unlocking her iPhone using (she says) the Face ID feature using a wedding picture in her home, she felt compelled to find a more secure solution. (Though Face ID does have strong safeguards against this exact type of hack).

The San Francisco storefront launch was mostly staffed by techies and engineer types (as well as one physicist!) who were hesitant to talk to a reporter. If you were looking to speak with someone not from a tech or science background, World’s storefront on opening day was not the place for you, though there was one passerby on their way to RSA, a cybersecurity conference taking place in the city this week, who stopped to ask the doormen a few questions before moving along. He told me he would never upload his information to the orb.

“It's this cool concept, but I'm not sure how secure it is,” he said. “I don't want to share … my biometric information just to get a QR code,” he added. “I mean, my QR code is right here, right,” gesturing to his face. “And I can use it anytime.”

World’s global launch has faced regulatory scrutiny for that exact reason. It was temporarily banned in a number of countries, including Kenya, Portugal, and Spain, and was ordered to stop operations in Hong Kong and Brazil. One senior Hong Kong official said the project “involves serious risks to personal data privacy.” South Korea fined World nearly $1 million for “alleged violations in collecting and transferring personal data.” At a press conference after the launch party, my colleague asked a panel of executives about the ban in Brazil. They responded that it was a “self pause” because the company wasn’t allowed to offer its standard crypto incentive for sign up.

At the storefront event, a man waiting outside told me he’d booked an appointment for 11:30 but noted he was an hour early and wasn't allowed to come inside yet. He was visiting from Poland and said his boss had attended the party the night before and was “super hyped” about the orb concept. “I don't know if it's gonna be like a worldwide revolution, but I just want to be on the wave,” he said.

“My only hesitation is that they are super huge,” he added. “I'm pretty afraid that they can actually do some stuff that we will not know about. That can be a little bit shady, but all in all, like, most of the businesses and most of the activities that we participate in have some kind of shadier sides.”

Back inside the store, World’s chief business officer, Trevor Traina, began a press conference. He called World “the brainchild of [OpenAI CEO] Sam Altman and [World CEO] Alex Blania” and waxed poetic about expanding to the United States and his former role as a US diplomat.

“From this same incredible brain, the brain of Sam Altman, after bringing in the era of artificial intelligence, came the intuition that in this new era, we as human beings will need to know what is real and what is not, that we may actually have to prove our humanness,” Traina said.

After he fielded media questions about data privacy and technical glitches (which Traina dubbed orb’s “stage fright”), I asked why the company’s services weren’t available in New York, which my colleagues and I had noticed in the fine print of their launch announcement. “We launched last night,” he claimed. World's communications team later corrected him: While New Yorkers can download the app, they can't actually use it there yet.