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This is the 111th edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI! For years, the Web3 × AI space has demanded verifiable AI as the bare minimum of security guarantees. Frontier labs refused to even consider it. Now, at last, Anthropic unveils a provable-inference prototype. Will it actually ship?

Thank you for being here! Let’s dive in.

What’s Hot in Web3 + AI?

Anthropic Adopts ZK Proofs to Offer Verifiable AI

Anthropic, arguably the largest and most influential AI lab at the moment, is taking steps to ensure the provability and verifiability of AI inference - a priority the decentralized AI (dAI) community has championed for years. Here’s why it matters.

Since ChatGPT‘s launch triggered the rapid expansion of AI, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly trusted with high-stakes decisions across industries and institutions. Yet frontier labs have paid little attention to demands for verifiability, i.e., the ability of users to confirm which model is executing and what training data underpins its outputs. Meanwhile, the push for the establishment of meaningful verifiability standards has come primarily from the Web3 + AI sector, which have spawned an entire subcategory of companies dedicated to solving exactly this problem.

Now, Anthropic finally listened and released FlashProve: an open-source performant prototype for provable inference.

FlashProve uses zkSNARKS - a type of cryptographic proof, and was developed in collaboration with StarkWare‘s Alessandro Chiesa - the developer of the zkSNARK protocol.

zkSNARK stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge and refers to a proof construction where one can prove certain information, without revealing that information, and without any interaction between the prover and verifier.

For nearly a decade, frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have relied on blind trust and institutional reputation to normalize “black box” operations. Even enterprise clients surrendering their proprietary data and business intelligence receive no assurance that outputs came from the advertised model architecture rather than a cheaper, degraded proxy.

That’s why, as StarkWare‘s co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson commented, proving the integrity of LLM inferencing is becoming more and more crucial.

However, whether Anthropic follows through on FlashProve, and whether verifiability becomes an industry standard rather than a press release, remains an open question.

The Web3 + AI Book Club

‘The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State’

November is here and with it came our next book club title: ‘The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State’ by Harvard University professor Jill Lepore.

With Orwellian overtones, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State demonstrates how technology has corroded global democracy, leading to the destruction of both human community and capacity for self-government, creating a new form of AI government, a digital citizen’s assembly, where AI will recommend the course of action to humans in place of human-run legislatures. Especially sobering with this proliferation of “dizzying, ever-changing schemes, prophesies, and predictions” is that the Artificial State has come at the expense of the natural world, leading to catastrophic loss of wildlife habitat and biodiversity.

Join us here to discuss the prospect of AI replacing democracy and what we can all do to prevent it.

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The Web3 + AI Book Club is live on Fable. Our November title is 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State' by Jill Lepore. Follow the link below and come join our literary community.

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