--- title: "Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Orb Startup Made a Cult-Like Demand of Its Employees" description: "Sam Altman's blockchain startup \"Tools for Humanity\" demands employees treat its surveillance orb project with a slavish devotion." date: "2025-11-23" modified: "2025-11-23" authors: - name: "Joe Wilkins" job_title: "Correspondent" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/jwilkins" url: "https://futurism.com/future-society/sam-altman-orb-cult" categories: - "Blockchain" - "Future Society" - "The Industrialists" --- # Sam Altman’s Eyeball-Scanning Orb Startup Made a Cult-Like Demand of Its Employees ![Sam Altman's blockchain startup "Tools for Humanity" demands employees treat its surveillance orb project with a slavish devotion.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Christina House / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images; Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images* If you thought tales of OpenAI's nonexistent [work-life balance]() were bad, wait until you get a load of Sam Altman's blockchain company. The startup, aptly named "Tools for Humanity," bills itself as a global tech company working on "open-source solutions" via the blockchain. Its flagship "solution" is [what it calls the Orb](), a spherical eyeball scanner which is supposed to solve the problem of "verifying humanness" through the crypto platform Worldcoin. If the product sounds bizarre, just wait until you hear about the team building it. According [to *Business Insider*](), the company demands fanatical devotion from its employees, who are strongly encouraged to work through their weekends "for the good of humanity." "We will neither fail, nor will we be an average outcome, and that's what we want and that's all I care about every day and all you should care about every day, and nothing else should matter," the company's CEO, Alex Blania told employees at an all-hands meeting, according to *BI*. "If you should care about something else, and if you want something else, you should just not be here. It's as simple as that." *BI* also viewed a video taken in February of the company's former office in San Francisco, which showed a TV screen broadcasting Tools for Humanity's "team values." "We are very (very) hard working," one screen insisted. "We believe this is a once in a lifetime project and that success is important for humanity. Therefore, we work weekends, we're always on call, and we push as hard as our circumstances allow us to. As a result we defy the odds, get to escape velocity and succeed on the mission." In the all-hands conclave reviewed by *BI*, Blania said that the company exists entirely to achieve its goal of building a global digital identity system — damn everything else. "We don't care about politics, we don't care about DEI, we don't care about anything, we just care about how can we achieve the mission through merit, performance, and excellence," the CEO said. The news comes as the Orb struggles to attract even a fraction of the attention Altman and his cronies had hoped. By November of 2025, two years after the product launched with a goal of two billion sign-ups, it's only managed to snag [17.5 million,]() or less than one percent of its total goal. With that failure in mind, the company's "humanitarian mission" looks much more like an ideological tool to justify some [pretty intense exploitation]() of the startup's workers than an altruistic duty to help humanity. Case in point, the demand for weekend work and always being on-call directly increases the amount of unpaid labor performed by employees, allowing the company to spend less on the workers building Orb as it flounders. The product might be nonsense — a surveillance orb inscrutably connected to the blockchain — but the exploitation behind it is clearly anything but. **More on Altman:** *[Sam Altman Now Has the Power to "Crash the Global Economy," Financial Analyst Warns]()* ## Author At Futurism, I focus on the intersection of technology and power — examining the economics, history, and politics behind today’s dystopian headlines. As a writer, I’m interested in topics ranging from AI’s impact on labor to startups nobody asked for. My prior work includes bylines in Jacobin, Verso, and Blue Labyrinths. My work for Futurism has been cited by publications including Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Technology Review, Time, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Verge, and Wired. I grew up in Michigan, attending Central Michigan University as well as Ball State University, where I earned a master of music. I now live in Brooklyn with my girlfriend and our cat Ziti. On weekends, you can find me hunched over a cold pint arguing geopolitics with the other transplants. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()