OpenAI is quietly building a social network and considering using biometric verification like World’s eyeball scanning orb or Apple’s Face ID to ensure its users are people, not bots.

OpenAI’s development of its own social network appears to be crystalizing around a singular mission: obliterate the bot problem that has made an endless and toxic sump of the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Sources familiar with the project told Forbes that the social network, which is still in the very early stages of development, has been envisioned as a real-humans-only platform, a potential selling point for the AI giant which is looking to capitalize on its viral ChatGPT and Sora apps. But should it launch, it will be wading into a market of powerful incumbents, like X, Instagram, and TikTok.

The app is being developed by a very small team — fewer than 10 people — and may include a biometric identity recognition element. Sources familiar with its development told Forbes that the team has considered requiring users to provide “proof of personhood” via Apple’s Face ID or the World Orb, a cantaloupe-sized eyeball scanner that uses a person's iris to generate a unique, verifiable ID. World is operated by Tools for Humanity, a company OpenAI CEO Sam Altman founded and currently chairs.

True biometric verification would ensure that all accounts on OpenAI’s social network have a real person behind them. While social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn do attempt to verify identity, they generally do so via phone and email verification, and/or behavioral or network signals. Neither has pursued a biometric solution that would presumably definitively prove a user is human. Privacy advocates have warned about the risks of identity verification like World’s as iris scans are unchangeable and could cause all manner of havoc in the wrong hands.

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