Sam Altman, OpenAI. Foto Getty Images
Sources familiar with the project told Forbes that the social network, which is in the very early stages of development, is intended as a platform solely for communicating with real people, which could be a competitive advantage for the artificial intelligence giant looking to capitalize on its viral apps ChatGPT and Sora. But if it launches, it will have to enter a market dominated by strong players like X, Instagram and TikTok.
The app is being developed by a very small team – less than 10 people – and could include an element of biometric personality recognition. The development team was considering requiring users to provide “proof of identity” with Apple’s Face ID or World Orb, a melon-sized eyeball scanner that uses the iris to generate a unique, verifiable identifier. The World app is operated by Tools for Humanity, a company founded and led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
True biometric verification would ensure that there is a real person behind all accounts on the OpenAI social network. While social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn attempt to verify identity, they typically do so through phone and email verification, as well as behavioral or network signals. None of them have developed a biometric solution that supposedly unambiguously proves a user is human. Privacy advocates warn of the risks of identity verification like the one World’s offers, since iris scans are immutable and can lead to all sorts of problems in the wrong hands.
Exactly how the social network will complement OpenAI’s existing product portfolio is not yet known, though sources say people will likely be able to use AI to create content, such as videos or images, on it. Meta’s Instagram, which has 3 billion monthly active users as of September, already has the ability to create AI-generated images directly within the app. There is currently no timetable for the launch of the OpenAI social network, and sources warn it could change significantly before it’s ready for public demonstration.
OpenAI declined to comment. The Verge reported in April that OpenAI was working on a social network.
For years, social networks have been plagued by bot accounts, which typically mimic human interactions to, for example, artificially inflate cryptocurrency prices or skew public opinion by spreading hate speech. This problem is particularly acute on Twitter, and it has gotten much worse after Ilon Musk acquired the platform, renamed it X, and fired about 80% of its employees, effectively wiping out the security and trust team responsible for moderating posts and removing bots from the platform.
Musk declared war on bots even before acquiring Twitter, and the company removed about 1.7 million bot accounts in 2025 as part of a purge designed to reduce spammy replies to posts. But they remain a problem.
Altman, a regular X user since 2008, has been outspoken about his dissatisfaction with bots on the platform. In September, he wrote on X that “for some reason the Twitter/ AI on Reddit seems very fake, which wasn’t the case a year or two ago.” A few days earlier, he made a similar point, citing the dead internet theory that the internet has been flooded with non-human activity since 2016. “I never took the dead internet theory seriously, but it seems there really are a lot of AI-driven Twitter accounts now,” he wrote.
OpenAI has a solid track record of creating apps that have enjoyed considerable popularity with consumers. The ChatGPT app, which made AI available to the general public, gained 100 million users within two months of launch and now has more than 800 million users. Sora, which uses AI to create videos, reached 1 million downloads in less than five days, indicating a faster growth rate than ChatGPT.
Despite this history, OpenAI is likely to face an exhausting battle if it decides to launch a social network. It will have to compete with Meta’s Threads app, which now has as many daily users on mobile devices as X, and newcomers like Bluesky, which has more than 40 million users, not to mention giants like Instagram and TikTok, which are leading the race to become platforms for AI-generated content. “Feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic content everywhere,” Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri wrote in December.
