SamAltman

Sam Altman’s World Network project (formerly Worldcoin) revolves around a glossy metallic Orb the size of a volleyball that scans irises—the most unique and immutable biometric identifier—and converts the patterns into a permanent “World ID.”. Once scanned, a person is cryptographically tied to the system for life. The company frames it as “proof of humanity” to distinguish real people from AI-generated entities online. Tools for Humanity, co-founded by Altman, initially targeted low-income communities in the Global South, offering crypto payments (sometimes worth tens of dollars) in exchange for iris scans. The project faced outright bans or severe restrictions in Brazil, Kenya, India, Spain, the Philippines, and elsewhere over privacy and exploitation concerns. It relaunched in the U.S. in 2025 with retail Orb locations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Nashville, paying participants roughly $40 in crypto at the time; the New York Times reported plans for 7,500 Orbs nationwide by year-end. The company has verified around 17.5 million people and has softened the Orb’s design (removing robotic voice features) to appear more “Apple-friendly.”

In February, 2025, OpenAI signed a landmark contract with the Pentagon to provide AI tools to the US government.

OpenAI claims that the contract establishes clear red lines around the use of its tools for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, but as watchdogs have repeatedly pointed out the devil is in the details.

For example, while OpenAI claims its tools will only be used within legal frameworks, the reality is that major gaps in existing law like FISA Section 702’s infamous data broker loophole allow the federal government to buy vast quantities of data, a loophole the Trump administration admits to exploiting. Previously, this data would have been impossible to sift through at scale, but advocates and experts warn that AI tools provided by OpenAI and other companies could easily be used to create AI spies to track every single American.

On killer robots, the deal is even more murky. As of May, 2026, Congress has not passed laws on the use of autonomous weapons systems or AI in military operations. Only a broad Pentagon directive creates any restrictions for US military use of these tools. AI systems integrated into military “kill chains” have already been implicated in the deaths of civilians in Iran and Gaza, and the spread of this technology poses significant domestic and international danger.

Altman has long proposed the concept of humans merging with AI to form a new kind of life. In his 2017 blog post “The Merge,” Altman wrote “we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”

In December, 2025, Wired reported that Altman has already begun to build that dystopian cyborg future. His new venture, Merge Labs, is working to build brain-computer interfaces that will bring his predicted “merge” to life.

While he works to merge human and machine, Altman is also working to artificially extend human life, gene-edit babies, and build the “network state” infrastructure where democratic oversight of his experiments and endeavors is a distant memory.

Altman provided the entire $180 million seed round for Retro Biosciences, a startup focused on reversing biological aging. The company pursues heterochronic parabiosis (stitching circulatory systems of old and young mice together so the older animals receive “youthful” blood factors) and partial cellular reprogramming using what are known as modified Yamanaka factors. Retro works exclusively with OpenAI’s first biology-specialized model, ChatGPT-4b, which re-engineered the Yamanaka proteins to make cellular reprogramming roughly 50 times more efficient than human scientists had previously achieved.

Genetic Enhancement and Designer Babies

In early 2026 Altman and his husband invested in Preventative, a San Francisco startup developing CRISPR-style embryo editing to “eliminate hereditary diseases” and produce more resilient children. Although the company publicly emphasizes disease prevention, embryo selection or editing for traits such as IQ or height is an obvious next step once the technology works. Germline editing for reproduction is banned in the United States and most developed countries, so Preventative is scouting out jurisdictions including the United Arab Emirates that may be more permissive.

For-Profit Governance and Escape from Democracy

Altman is an investor in Próspera, a for-profit autonomous “startup city”/special economic zone on an island in Honduras operating under its own private legal and regulatory framework. The project markets itself as “building the future of human governance: privately run and for-profit,” with voluntary association and entrepreneurial innovation as its principles. Critics call it neocolonial corporate monarchy: wealthy CEOs writing rules for a poor country, low-tax deregulated enclaves with little accountability. When a subcontractor fell to his death from an unfinished tower at night, the company handled compensation internally under its own labor rules; no independent public investigation occurred. Próspera already hosts longevity clinics, reversible gene-therapy platforms, “human brain uploading” research, and a dedicated Longevity District. Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen are also investors.

OpenAI insiders have discussed building a literal bunker to shelter core researchers from the “geopolitical chaos or violent competition” expected once AGI is released. In summer 2023, co-founder Ilya Sutskever reportedly told scientists, “Once we all get into the bunker… We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI.” Altman himself maintains a reinforced underground concrete basement at home and has mused on podcasts about upgrading it to a proper bunker, not explicitly for AI, he claims, but because “people are dropping bombs in the world again.” A 2016 New Yorker profile revealed his longstanding survivalist streak: he stockpiles guns, gold, antibiotics, gas masks, and potassium iodide; he owns land in Big Sur he can fly to; and his pandemic backup plan was to fly with Peter Thiel to Thiel’s New Zealand bolthole, a doomsday pepper hotspot for the global elite.

A pending lawsuit from the family of Adam Raine, who dies at age 16,  alleges that ChatGPT actively isolated him from loved ones, provided technical advice on his suicide plan, helped draft a suicide note, analyzed a photo of his method and offered advice on how to “upgrade” it, and responded to his final messages with statements such as “You don’t owe anyone that [survival]” and “Thanks for being real about it. I won’t look away from it.” The suit claims ChatGPT failed basic suicide-prevention protocols and instead functioned as an enabler.

In January 2026, Altman’s younger sister Annie Altman filed a federal lawsuit in Missouri detailing repeated sexual abuse from ages 3 to 13 inside the family home outside St. Louis. The complaint describes graphic acts and claims lasting PTSD, depression, and bodily injury. Altman, his mother, and two brothers issued a joint denial on X, attributing the accusations to Annie’s mental-health challenges and refusal of conventional treatment. The case remains ongoing.