On the Eve of OpenAI’s IPO Sprint, Sam Altman’s Other Bet Is Stuck in a Layoff Quagmire: Has the Eyeball-Scanning Empire Dream Collapsed?

Same Founder, Two Companies with Radically Different Faces

While the world’s attention converges on OpenAI’s historic impending IPO, its chief Sam Altman’s other quietly placed wager — the iris-scanning identity verification company Tools for Humanity — is sending out the stinging signal of severe layoffs. This star project, which once carried Altman’s utopian vision of global basic income and digital personhood, and had a peak valuation approaching $3 billion, is now struggling in a revenue desert. According to multiple sources, Tools for Humanity has initiated a significant round of staff reductions, affecting several core departments including market expansion and operations.

This harsh reality forms a brutal mirror image to the grand AGI commercial blueprint Altman has been painting in the OpenAI boardroom. OpenAI is telling a growth story about “monetizing superintelligence,” while Tools for Humanity is still painfully trying to validate the first mile of its business logic. The stark contrast between the two exposes that not every experiment by this red-hot founder automatically gets a free pass from the market.

The Worldcoin Halo Fades: Why Can’t Eyeball Scans Translate into Real Money?

The core product of Tools for Humanity is the Worldcoin crypto project and its companion iris-scanning orb called “Orb.” Its design blueprint is enormously ambitious — to scan the irises of billions of people globally, build an unforgeable “Proof of Personhood” network, and eventually distribute Worldcoin tokens as a form of global basic income. Yet this narrative, heavily imbued with a tech-messianic flavor, has been crashing against the iron wall of reality since its inception.

On one hand, regulatory agencies in multiple countries have launched intensive scrutiny and bans covering data privacy, biometric information security, and financial compliance, with nations such as Germany, France, and Kenya successively halting or restricting its data collection, directly severing the artery of large-scale expansion. On the other hand, the underlying token economics remain under persistent pressure; the real on-chain active addresses fall far short of expectations, and the user-acquisition model of swapping iris scans for airdrops quickly hit a bottleneck. When the novelty of “scan your eyeball and get free tokens” wore off, Tools for Humanity found itself trapped in an awkward limbo: the infrastructure cost of biometric identification is high, while the willingness to pay around “Proof of Personhood” is far from awakening, leaving both the B2B monetization scenarios and the C-side revenue model hovering in a void.

Behind the Layoffs: A Non-Profit Long-term Dream Collides with Commercial Short-Termism

People familiar with the matter revealed that the management of Tools for Humanity admitted in an internal letter that they had “overly optimistically projected the speed of market conversion,” and described this contraction as a “forced refocusing of priorities.” The company plans to more narrowly bet its remaining resources on a handful of regulator-friendly markets and attempt to pivot toward an enterprise-grade “human verification API” service, hoping to activate corporate budgets through use cases such as anti-Sybil attacks and vote verification. But the brutal question remains: against the backdrop of the capital frenzy as OpenAI prepares to land on the public market, investors have less and less patience to bankroll this kind of infrastructure steeped in intense idealism.

This round of layoffs is not just ordinary cost control; it represents a vote of no confidence cast against Altman’s parallel universe. While the same helmsman is devouring commercial value at an exponential speed in the AI race, his digital identity territory is still fighting for its most basic survival logic. This serves as a reminder to all observers: even the most dazzling tech evangelist cannot effortlessly steer two wars that belong to entirely different gravitational fields at the same time. The market only applauds quantifiable revenue, and will not open its wallet for a grandiose “unified human identity” sentiment.