OpenAI’s development of its own social network appears to be crystalizing around a singular mission: obliterate the bot problem that has made an endless and toxic sump of the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Sources familiar with the project told Forbes that the social network, which is still in the very early stages of development, has been envisioned as a real-humans-only platform, a potential selling point for the AI giant which is looking to capitalize on its viral ChatGPT and Sora apps. But should it launch, it will be wading into a market of powerful incumbents, like X, Instagram, and TikTok.
The app is being developed by a very small team — fewer than 10 people — and may include a biometric identity recognition element. Sources familiar with its development told Forbes that the team has considered requiring users to provide “proof of personhood” via Apple’s Face ID or the World Orb, a cantaloupe-sized eyeball scanner that uses a person’s iris to generate a unique, verifiable ID. World is operated by Tools for Humanity, a company OpenAI CEO Sam Altman founded and currently chairs.
True biometric verification would ensure that all accounts on OpenAI’s social network have a real person behind them. While social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn do attempt to verify identity, they generally do so via phone and email verification, and/or behavioral or network signals. Neither has pursued a biometric solution that would presumably definitively prove a user is human. Privacy advocates have warned about the risks of identity verification like World’s as iris scans are unchangeable and could cause all manner of havoc in the wrong hands.
Just how the social network would complement OpenAI’s existing product portfolio couldn’t be learned, though sources said people will likely be able to use AI to make 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 launch timeline for OpenAI’s social network and it could change dramatically before it’s ready to show publicly, sources cautioned.
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 engagement to do things like pump cryptocurrency prices or distort public perception through amplifying hate speech. They have been a particular problem on Twitter, one that was made exponentially worse when Elon Musk acquired it, renamed it X, and sacked about 80% of its staff, gutting the trust and safety team charged with moderating posts and booting bots off the platform.
Musk declared war on bots prior to acquiring Twitter and in 2025 the company removed about 1.7 million bot accounts in a purge intended to reduce reply spam. But they continue to be a problem.
Altman, a regular user of X since 2008, has been forthright about his frustration with the bots on it. In September, he posted to X that “somehow AI twitter/AI reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn’t a year or two ago.” A few days earlier, he made a similar point, citing dead internet theory, which posits that since 2016, the internet has been overrun with non-human activity. “I never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM [AI]-run twitter accounts now,” he wrote.
OpenAI has a solid track record of building apps with significant consumer virality. ChatGPT, which brought AI to the mainstream, had 100 million users within two months of its launch and now boasts over 800 million. Its AI video app Sora hit 1 million downloads in less than five days, a growth rate faster than ChatGPT’s.
Despite that history, OpenAI likely faces a grueling battle if it does decide to launch a social network. It will need to compete with Meta’s Threads app, which now has as many mobile daily users as X, and upstarts like Bluesky which has over 40 million total users, not to mention giants like Instagram and TikTok, which are ahead in the race to become AI content destinations. “The feeds are starting to fill up with synthetic everything,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted in December.
Rich Nieva and Phoebe Liu contributed reporting.
