--- description: Find out why Alex Blania made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. title: TIME100 AI 2025: Alex Blania image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte42f0cf01bf5a43b/6998c92183ec373fd5c7adc3/Alex-Blania-copy.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Aug 26, 2025 # Alex Blania Co-founder and CEO, Tools for Humanity by [Billy Perrigo](/author/billy-perrigo/) ## Billy Perrigo Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Correspondent  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) The rise of AI is fundamentally altering the landscape of the internet, with it now possible to generate fake but realistic photos, videos, audio, and text. As AI becomes more autonomous, these forms of deception will only compound. The much repeated adage that you can’t trust what you see online is becoming relevant again. Alex Blania’s World ID project—co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman—aims to solve that problem. To do so, his company, Tools for Humanity, has launched what it calls the Orb: a piece of hardware that scans your iris to give you a private ID that serves as a kind of anonymous passport for the internet. The idea is to allow sites across the internet to be cryptographically certain that a user is a unique human rather than, say, a criminal, or even a nefarious AI agent. As AI makes online abuse more scalable, more and more companies are turning to the Orb for solutions. Reddit is exploring a partnership with Tools for Humanity to stop its forums being overrun with spam, while preserving anonymity for those who want it; gaming company Razr is already using World for “human verification” services, and Tinder is trialing an anti-catfishing service. “What we are building will be a very important trust infrastructure for human interaction on the internet,” says Blania. “Without such a technology, higher \[AI\] agency and real-time video generation will by default decrease trust across the internet.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305829/alex-blania/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305829/alex-blania/"},"headline":"Alex Blania","datePublished":"2025-08-26T18:50:44.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:42.292Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305829/alex-blania/","keywords":["Tech","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades","TIME100 AI 2025"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte42f0cf01bf5a43b/6998c92183ec373fd5c7adc3/Alex-Blania-copy.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Billy Perrigo","jobTitle":"Correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/billy-perrigo/"}],"creator":"Billy Perrigo","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte42f0cf01bf5a43b/6998c92183ec373fd5c7adc3/Alex-Blania-copy.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305829/alex-blania/","name":"Alex Blania"}}]}] ```