Sam Altman's "Eye Scan" company executives resign en masse, Orb project faces another trust crisis

According to Business Insider, the startup Tools for Humanity, co-founded by Sam Altman and known for its eye-scanning device “Orb,” has recently experienced a wave of executive departures, sparking widespread attention to its long-term strategy and corporate culture.

Sources familiar with the matter revealed that over the past few months, two core executives and several senior employees have left the company. Adrian Ludwig, the Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Architect, resigned after two years in the role; he previously worked at Alphabet, Atlassian, and Adobe. Another departing executive is Damien Kieran, the Chief Legal and Privacy Officer, who previously held key positions at BeReal and Twitter, leaving after Elon Musk took over Twitter.

In addition to these two, several other management team members, including the Head of Protocol and Application Research, HR Director, Talent Lead, and Human Operations Manager, have also left. A former employee also stated that the company’s Data Protection Officer left last November, and both the Device Product Lead and a newly hired lawyer have submitted their resignations.

Business Insider also reviewed an internal Slack message in which CEO Alex Blania mentioned that the company is maintaining operations through temporary roles, including key functions such as marketing, operations partnerships, HR, legal, and concierge. He emphasized that the team needs to be “highly dedicated and mission-aligned,” implying that personnel turnover is related to cultural fit.

A former employee pointed out that management style and corporate culture issues are significant reasons for the recent wave of departures. A company spokesperson responded that each employee’s decision is different and stated that the team is focused on “building trustworthy verification mechanisms in an environment where the boundaries between artificial intelligence and human identity are increasingly blurred.”

Notably, this turbulence coincides with Sam Altman and Alex Blania shifting some of their focus to their new company, Merge Labs. Tools for Humanity had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in an attempt to verify identities through global iris scans, but faced regulatory resistance in multiple countries. Former employees also expressed concerns about its sustainability. The combination of executive departures and strategic uncertainty has once again brought the future of the Orb project into focus.