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This is the 107th edition of The Web3 + AI Daily - your definitive guide to the intersection of blockchain and AI! Today's question: how can we trust an AI agent to act only within the mandate it was given, and how do we stop the fraud that fills the vacuum when we can't? Three collaborations are attacking this from different angles: World and Zoom, Mysten Labs and Google Cloud, and Circle and Proof.

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What’s Hot in Web3 + AI?

World Launches Anti-Deepfake Proofs for Zoom

World, the proof-of-personhood protocol co-founded by OpenAI‘s Sam Altman, just launched a new suite of ID verification products, targeting banks and financial institutions, AI agents, and Zoom‘s enterprise clients.

The suite combines three existing products, which World said can help institutions guard against deepfake fraud and AI-driven impersonation across customer accounts, employee workflows and AI agents, per a press release. [It] bundles the World ID app, World ID for Zoom and World ID for Agents.

The World ID app is an identity wallet that stores “proofs of humanity,” including biometric data. Banks could leverage it to authenticate customers without collecting or retaining personal documents, though World has not yet announced any bank integrations. Separately, World ID for Agents enables users to delegate certain proofs to an agent so it can trade on their behalf.

On the other hand, World ID for Zoom is specifically designed to fight deepfakes:

World ID for Zoom is now available in the Zoom Marketplace. The system compares an image captured by the company’s iris-scanning Orb, a live selfie and the participant’s video feed before displaying a Human Badge visible to other meeting participants.

The offering is built on three cryptographic proofs available through the World ID app. Proof of Human establishes that someone is a real and unique person through a one-time visit to one of World’s Orb devices. Proof of Presence uses a selfie liveness check on a phone, while Proof of Attributes confirms details such as nationality or age from a government ID, revealing only the requested information.

World first announced its Zoom integration in April, when it was undergoing limited beta testing with VanEck Funds. The feature is now available globally to Zoom enterprise customers. World also named Bain Capital, Pantera Capital and other financial firms as initial design partners for its broader identity verification technology.

With agentic activity exploding, and AI-enhanced scams and fraud skyrocketing alongside it, finding a straightforward way to prove our humanity online has become painfully urgent.

The release cited a Deloitte forecast that AI-enabled fraud losses in the U.S. could reach $40 billion by 2027, up from an estimated $12.3 billion in 2023.

Yet I’d be remiss not to flag that World’s data protection practices and its handling of biometric data have drawn serious scrutiny in the past. It had faced pushback on four continents: Hong Kong ordered its iris-scanning operations halted, South Korea fined it, Spain ordered its iris data deleted, and Bavaria’s regulator ruled its practices fell short of GDPR.

Mysten Labs and Google Unveil Verifiable Agent Arbiter (VAA)

Mysten Labs, in collaboration with Google Cloud, announced Verifiable Agent Arbiter (VAA) - an evidence layer being co-developed so enterprises can prove their AI agents acted within the authority they were granted.

As agents move to executing transactions, negotiating with other agents, and acting across company boundaries, VAA gives enterprises a record of that activity that can be verified independently of the platform that produced it.

VAA separates the record of an agent’s activity from the proof of its integrity. Detailed telemetry, including prompts, model outputs, tool calls, and policy decisions, remains private in customer-controlled Google Cloud Storage. Cryptographic proofs of that record will be stored on [Walrus Foundation‘s] Walrus, the data platform built for the demands of AI, and coordinated on [Sui Foundation‘s] Sui, a Layer 1 blockchain.

VAA is designed to help enterprise clients comply with regulatory requirements, especially amid the EU AI Act, "which from 2027 will introduce penalties of up to €15 million or 3% of global annual turnover for logging failures."

Circle Teams Up with Proof to Guarantee Agents Act on Humans’ Behalf

The stablecoin issuer Circle has collaborated with the trusted identity provider Proof to certify that agentic payments are initiated and approved by human users.

At Money20/20, teams from the companies will demonstrate a demo of an AI agent completing an identity-gated purchase where the agent presents a verified Proof credential using x401, Proof’s open identity protocol, and pays the merchant in USDC over x402 using a Circle Agent Wallet.

Proof relies on the HTTP 401 “Unauthorized” response so a site can tell an agent what proof of identity it needs, whereas Circle leverages the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” code.

One answers how an agent pays, and the other answers who it acts for. Used together, they also let a business pay an identity provider for each check on the spot, without a sales process or a negotiated agreement.

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