OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the technology world by surprise on Thursday with the release of Operator, his company’s first AI agent that can act autonomously on the web.
But OpenAI is not Altman’s only venture that’s trying to capitalize on the popularity of AI agents.
World, a web3 project by Altman and Alex Blania’s Tools for Humanity that was formerly known as Worldcoin, is based on the idea that it will eventually be impossible to distinguish humans from AI agents on the internet. To address this, World wants to create digital “proof of human” tools. After scanning your eyeball with a silver metal orb, World will give you a unique identifier on the blockchain to verify that you’re a human.
In essence, World wants to create tools that link certain AI agents to people’s online personas, letting other users verify that an agent is acting on a person’s behalf, according to its chief product officer, Tiago Sada.
Tools for Humanity has a reputation for pivots and finding itself in the middle of controversies. World started as a crypto project, was temporarily banned in a few countries, and was recently ordered to let Europeans delete their biometric data on request. In October, the project dropped “coin” from its name, signaling that it would focus more on human verification and AI rather than crypto. And now, it’s all about AI agent verification.
While verifying AI agents so they can do things on behalf of people may seem like a divergence from World’s mission to verify humans with web3 IDs, Sada says it’s a critical and logical next step for the project.
“This idea of delegating your ‘proof of personhood’ to an agent and letting it act on your behalf is actually super important,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Instead of only allowing people you think are human [on your website], you will also allow AI agents that represent a real human. This is where World ID comes in.”
World’s ID technology could also be used to license AI agents to act on your behalf, Sada said. In a recent blog post, the project notes that proof of human tools will not only distinguish humans from bots, as they do today, but could help people control a network of AI agents online.
World seems to be expanding its tools to verify “digital actions” that belong to a person, even if they didn’t come from their account. The project says its tools for AI will prove to be essential in 2025, but Sada said the firm will “need to see” if any of those tools involve linking AI agents to people. It sure sounds like the startup is thinking about it, though.
“There’s certain apps where it doesn’t matter if an actual person is using it, or an agent acting on their behalf. You just care to know there is a person endorsing that interaction,” said Sada.
Many websites today use tools from Cloudflare and Snowflake to block AI bots from scraping their website. Early users of OpenAI’s Operator found that some websites blocked OpenAI’s new agent by default.
But Sada says businesses may reconsider their permissions to let some AI agents use their services.
“At the end of the day, businesses want to sell more. They want to serve more users,” said Sada. “If a delivery app’s sales increase because there’s a bunch of agents coming and replying on behalf of their users, the business is going to be happy about that.”
That example is quite timely. OpenAI just announced collaborations with Uber, Instacart and DoorDash to allow its new Operator agent to use their platforms. This is a major shift for these companies, who are used to serving users on their apps. Instead, online businesses now seem to be preparing for a future in which some of their user interactions will be facilitated by AI agents.
“If an agent comes in with a blue check mark and says, ‘Yes, I’m a bot. Don’t worry, don’t freak out. I’m actually here to buy a hot dog for Tiago,’ then those businesses can let that [agent] in,” said Sada.
The problem with letting in every AI agent, or every bot on the internet, is that it could open your website up to DDOS attacks, scams, or other bad actors. By only allowing in a couple AI agents per person, Sada says, businesses can access new users through these agents without risking the integrity of their site.
Altman’s many ventures may seem random, but viewed together, they create a network of tools to power a future that has AI, and by extension OpenAI, at its center. His nuclear fusion startup, Helion Energy, could one day provide the energy to power OpenAI’s data centers, and the longevity science startup he backs, Retro Biosciences, is already using OpenAI’s models to try and increase the human lifespan.
A key question around World is whether its tools will one day integrate more deeply with OpenAI. Altman speaks at World’s events, supposedly talks with the team every week, and the project continues to lean into its AI work.
Platforms seem to be lining up to let OpenAI’s agents use their services, but World may come to play a significant role in verifying those agents and others.
