The CEO of one of the biggest artificial intelligence companies has a digital identification plan that could turn into a censorship tool.
During a U.S. Federal Reserve conference on July 22, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed the threat artificial intelligence could pose to online forms of identification and verification. Unfortunately, his solution is a dystopian digital/biometric ID which, if implemented, could facilitate financial and online censorship. His remarks came mere days before his company announced a new partnership with the United States government.
Altman claimed to be “very nervous about” the growing issue of AI successfully imitating people’s faces and voices. Altman added that it “terrifies” him that some financial institutions use a voice print or face print as authentication to move significant amounts of money or carry out other transactions. He warned, “AI has fully defeated that. AI has fully defeated most of the ways that people authenticate currently, other than like passwords.”
.@OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is worried about AI circumventing online authentication. Unfortunately, his solution of a biometric ID is just as bad pic.twitter.com/kp8fVXiqq9
— Catherine Salgado (@CatSalgado32) August 8, 2025
Therefore, he repeated, “I am very nervous that we have an impending, significant… fraud crisis.” He claimed, “Some, some bad actor is going to release it. This is not a super difficult thing to do. This is coming very, very soon. And, you know, there's obviously some reports now of these sort of like ransom attacks, where people have the voice of your kid or your parent and they make this urgent call that is going to get so compelling.”
According to Altman, “Society has to deal with this problem more generally, but people are going to have to change the way they interact. They're going to have to change the way they verify,” he argued.
But Altman claims to have a solution. His World identification system, previously called World Coin, promises to, “Distinguish between humans and AI online. Access universally inclusive finance. And connect with other real humans. It's free to join and designed to be owned by everyone.”
Altman’s World also claims to be a “global digital passport for the age of AI.” World ID works by scanning a user’s eyes through something called an “orb” and transforming that biometric data into a method of authentication.
The terrifying part is that if a person links gaming, shopping, and other recreational and financial transactions to this, as World ID recommends, it could simply refuse to allow the person to authenticate using the biometric data. If World followed in the footsteps of banks and social media companies and aimed to shut down a person’s access because of his free speech, it could.
Since OpenAI just announced a new partnership with the U.S. General Services Administration for use of ChatGPT, Altman’s power to threaten free speech in conjunction with the government is heightened.
In communist China, a similar form of digital ID allows the government to prevent political dissidents from traveling anywhere or buying anything through control of the ID. And since Altman also controls OpenAI, financial censorship could be extended to ChatGPT and even other social media and artificial intelligence platforms.
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