The world needs a new approach to privacy and safety for the latest wave of artificial intelligence technology, AI agents, OpenAI’s Sam Altman told the world’s largest gathering of privacy professionals in the US. One solution, he said, is his own new product for online verification — World. “We've all seen the problem on social networks, where they're overrun by bots,” Altman said. “It'd be really nice to know when a post is really from a real person, for example.”
The world needs a new approach to privacy and safety for the latest wave of artificial intelligence technology, AI agents, OpenAI’s Sam Altman told the world’s largest gathering of privacy professionals in the US today.* One solution, he said, is his own new product for online verification: World.
Technology is advancing so rapidly that it could soon become impossible to distinguish between humans and AI agents on the internet, Altman said. And he touted his new tool to help solve that problem.
“We've all seen the problem on social networks, where they're overrun by bots,” Altman said. “It'd be really nice to know when a post is really from a real person, for example.”
Altman acknowledged during his keynote speech that AI products, including his own, are creating problems around data privacy. One emerging issue is that more and more people are talking to AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT about their most intimate personal problems, such as legal issues or health problems, Altman said. And the issue remains of how to protect that information and keep it private.
“That is a place where I think society will have to come up with a new sort of framework, hopefully relatively soon,” Altman said.
But Altman was evasive about what privacy actually means to him.
“I would be too shy to say that, in this room,” Altman said.
He also stopped short of pushing for new guardrails now around AI, arguing that the technology is changing so rapidly it’s nearly impossible to predict what sort of issues will arise.
“I think the right thing to do is watch this incredible new wave roll out and respond very quickly as the problems emerge,” Altman said.
In the meantime, he pitched another solution — what he calls “proof-of-human” tools like World, a new product from himself and Alex Blania, co-founder of Tools for Humanity.
World, a web3 project, is aimed at giving people a unique identifier online that can be used to verify they’re human. After scanning someone’s eyeball with a silver metal orb, World then gives them a unique identifier. As a bonus, people who get verified will get a digital token they can use for other purchases, what Altman called “bootstrapping” to help build the network to scale.
World began as a crypto project, but it was met with resistance and even temporarily banned in some countries. The project was ordered to let Europeans delete their biometric data on request. Then last October, the project dropped “coin” from its name, in a shift to focus more on human verification.
“Maybe the broader, bigger picture here is that I think World, if it turns out to be very successful, I think it will be more than just proof-of-human,” Blania said. “I think it will be a network that really gives access to this new kind of technology to as many people as possible, and gives them access to the most important tools that are being developed.”
*IAPP Global Privacy Summit 2025, Washington, DC, April 22-24, 2025.
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