Sam Altman has cooked up a plan to make his cryptocurrency/identity/eyeball-scanning-orb venture more useful by – you guessed it – adding agentic AI to the mix. Now the technology behind it will be used to identify the human behind bots.
World, known as WorldCoin until late 2024 when AI became trendier than cryptocurrency, announced on Tuesday that it was opening a limited beta of its new AgentKit. The new tech, says World, will serve as a way to tie AI agents directly to a human to prevent bad actors from abusing agentic AI and "infuse trust into the system."
Given this is a World venture, that damn orb is still involved.
For those that don't recall, WorldCoin spun up in 2019 with the goal of bringing everyone into its global cryptocurrency ecosystem using an electronic orb that scans a user's iris and creates a unique World ID associated with that individual. The idea behind the whole thing was to put personhood on the blockchain in a pseudonymous manner that would allow individuals to transact with other World users without having to reveal their identity.
As we noted in 2023, Altman and World had a professed goal of getting a billion people on the platform within 2 years. It's been more than that, and according to the AgentKit announcement, World has only managed to sign up 18 million suckers users to date.
ONow, with cryptocurrency having largely fallen out of favor (including WorldCoin - the coin itself has lost 76 percent of its value since launching in 2023) and a bunch of biometric data on file, World is looking for something to do with it. Enter AgentKit.
AgentKit serves as an extension to Coinbase's x402 protocol, which allows cryptocurrency users to exchange digital cash directly over HTTP.
x402 has also been extended to serve as a way to limit AI agent access to online resources by charging them micropayments. While that's enough to filter out some bad actors, World argues that actual identity verification is needed.
"Through World ID, a person can cryptographically and anonymously prove that they are a unique human without revealing any personal information to anyone," World said in a press release. "That same proof can now extend to their agents."
According to World, AgentKit allows verified World ID holders (i.e., those who've had their irises scanned by an orb) to delegate their World IDs to AI agents, essentially serving as cryptographic proof of the individual behind the agent. A single human is allowed to delegate their World ID to as many agents as they want.
World describes AgentKit as being useful for spam prevention and other forms of abuse, like using AI agents to scalp tickets or reservations, prevent the flooding of news rankings with garbage, and the like. Presumably, they'll need to get some businesses on board requiring AgnentKit identity for certain services before consumers will take the bait, thereby finally making World relevant.
AgentKit details are available on World's documentation site for those who wish to wade into the weeds and learn more.
Neither World, nor its parent company Tools For Humanity, responded to questions for this story. ®
Source: The register