Thomas Scott – Tools for Humanity

He’s certainly got a lot of explaining to do on all shores. Such is the case when you’re the legal boss for an ambitious project co-invented by Sam Altman that aims to create tools humans need to prepare for AI; the very mention of it results in many confused faces.

Thomas Scott / Tools for Humanity / Chief Legal Officer & Corporate Secretary

Well, Thomas Scott is here and there and places in between as he tries to clear up the mysteries of his Bay Area employer, the initial developers and contributors to the Worldcoin project Tools for Humanity, which is harnessing the latest of the wired wonders for what’s envisioned to be a global identity and financial network to bring equity and opportunity to people who might not have access to conventional financial services.

“The more transparent financial flows are, the better the probability that a country experiences stabler and more responsive government, is less corrupt and ultimately enjoys more sustainable and widely shared economic development,” he tells Vanguard from his San Francisco office in April. “All these parts fit holistically.”

That was the gist of Scott’s message to the Parliament of Kenya last September. Scott and his fellow Tools for Humanity C-suiters believe that cryptocurrency and other blockchain technologies have as much a place in economically developing countries as in their wealthier counterparts,  though authorities in a few countries are confronted with the attention-grabbing new technology. Still, with 400,000 Kenyans having signed up for Worldcoin, Scott made his case that the citizenry fathoms the complexities of e-money and this is a legit operation cofounded by the right Sam—the one with the Altman surname as opposed to FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried who in March was sentenced to 25 years in prison for massive fraud.

Nevertheless, questions about Worldcoin remain, which Scott says he understands. After all, industry typically evolves faster than the regulatory agencies, and cryptocurrency can be one tough concept to grasp. Only, according to Scott, it needn’t be so, and he’s optimistic that Kenya will lift its ban once it better understands the concept (authorities have since dropped the case, Scott says).

“We’ve found that the more we engage regulators, they shift from being skeptical of our motives to being interested in learning more, and in several places ultimately open to exploring ways to collaborate,” he says. “But it does take time to explain.”

Covering all bases

In retrospect, Scott says Tools for Humanity can take its share of the blame for the Kenyan government’s reaction to Worldcoin, acknowledging that while the firm was legally compliant, it didn’t sufficiently introduce itself and the project to the many stakeholders who ended up taking an interest. Privacy is on everybody’s mind, what with the European Union at the regulatory forefront with others to follow. Worldcoin uses biometric data—i.e., encrypted pieces of data derived from iris images—to verify a user’s unique humanness. However, as Scott quickly emphasizes, it’s with the customer’s consent that the project goes to great lengths to ensure that a person understands each stage of the process they are taking part in.

“We want to know as little as possible about Worldcoin network participants,” he says. “If you take action here and there, you’re not traced. Each action is anonymous. The World ID vouches you’re a person and that this person has not engaged in X activity before. We think it’s so novel and potentially revolutionary.”

And, he says, it is less intrusive than such enterprises as Google and Facebook, where each customer has an extremely detailed profile fused to target them with specific, highly personalized advertising. Worldcoin’s attributes being privacy and inclusivity, Scott says its time has come. Scott says he expects that, in due time, regulators to agree.

“Has the law caught up?” he rhetorically asks. “That’s part of the explanatory challenge. If you process personal data, you must have a good reason, and often the user must consent. We’re helping people prove online that they’re human beings, and we’re almost ahead of the public consciousness.”

AI’s attributes

As chief legal officer and corporate secretary, Scott will have his hands full overseeing the many details and ensuring compliance with present rules while trying to anticipate what’s next in the rulebooks everywhere. Then there’s artificial intelligence—another of the wired world’s newest developments—entering the picture, and Scott seeing it as both helpful and inevitable in practically every industry.

“It’s too good a tool for humankind to pass up,” he says. “The real challenge is that, if AI succeeds technologically, it creates massive implications socially by making it essentially impossible to distinguish between AI and people. That is where World ID comes in.”

Scott seems fit to contribute to this mission, the 2011 Sanford Law School graduate, a legal veteran of Bay Area tech companies, and a worldly 40-year-old who was extending his outreach at a young age.

As a 2006 University of South Carolina undergrad, he interned with The Carter Center and afterward with then-Sen. Joseph Biden. As a law student, he was part of the defense team of former Liberian President Charles G. Taylor at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Netherlands and interned on the Domestic Policy Council of the Obama White House. Upon earning his law degree and clerking in federal courts in Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina, he served a 2013-14 stint with human rights activist and respected jurist Justice Edwin Cameron at the Constitutional Court of South Africa.

Scott once envisioned himself in a governmental role, and he earned a master’s in public affairs at Princeton University alongside law school. A dozen years later, Scott says he likes his path.

Scott further honed his skills from 2014 to 2017 at the D.C. office of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and then went in-house at Cruise, a General Motors-owned autonomous car company in San Francisco. The three-and-a-half years there was quite the eye-opener, he says, exposing Scott to open-source software, advanced hardware and machine learning—all integral areas at Tools for Humanity.

In January 2021, a lawyer friend introduced Scott to Tools for Humanity’s co-founders, and they just clicked. While Scott was new to blockchain and crypto technology, he was up to speed on machine learning and the legal issues around personal data.

Developing his tools

Though Tools for Humanity started with about 10 people, it was growing. From those early days, when, as the first legal hire, he had to set up DocuSign and source basic contract templates, his responsibilities have intensified exponentially, with Scott now overseeing a global legal team that’s dispersed in the United States, Germany, Mexico, India and Singapore. Tools for Humanity is now active in Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Germany, South Korea, Japan, the United States and Singapore, and its global footprint is expected to grow as AI becomes more ubiquitous.

Of course, that leaves Scott and his legal colleagues with much explaining to do. Tools for Humanity also has a Munich office, so Scott’s gotten used to the 11-hour flights from San Francisco to Germany’s third-largest city. Time flies, he says, when he’s got his laptop, and there’s a mission at hand.

“I always wanted to do something that contributed to making a difference for the better,” he says. “This is it.”

Bay Area life also satisfies Scott, who notes that he doesn’t miss the heat and humidity of South Carolina. Scott’s wife is a veterinarian, and they share their home with Rosie, the yellow lab. The couple enjoys bike rides, yoga and sports, though work is never far from Scott’s mind.

“We’re not just asking what the legal standard is today. Like our technology, for the legal team, on privacy and many other issues around cryptocurrency, we have to be prepared to go beyond that,” Scott says.