Zoom and big financial firms add ‘Proof of Human’ badges from Sam Altman’s World to stop fraud and deep fakes

It’s one of the most urgent problems of the AI age: How to tell if the person you’re chatting with on the Internet is real, or a clever bot pretending to be human.

In recent years, the inability to distinguish bots from humans has led to billions of dollars of fraud as AI agents trick companies into providing goods and services.

In the most extreme cases, crooks have deployed deep fakes of corporate executives in order to trick employees into sending fraudulent wire transfers.

But now a solution may be at hand.

On Sunday, a company called World—which makes an orb device that uses iris scans to create a “ proof of humanity “—announced that video conferencing service Zoom, as well as several big financial companies, are adopting its technology to keep out malicious bots.

The verification tool is part of a broader suite of services called World ID.

“World ID for Zoom is designed to protect sensitive, high-stakes conversations by proving that a real and unique human is present.

The integration uses cryptography to confirm that the person behind the screen is a verified human,” said World, which was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a statement.

In the case of Zoom calls, the way it works is that people on the video call who have cleared World ID’s security hurdles will appear on-screen with a little blue badge that signals they are human, and that they are the person who they claim to be.

The following screenshot, supplied by World, shows how the badge appears on a Zoom call: Companies can, of course, decide when such proof is required, and reserve this level of scrutiny for sensitive calls.

The technology underlying World ID’s verification system is controversial, but its advocates say it is effective from both a security and a privacy perspective.

It is tied to an orb device that captures an image of people’s irises—a biometric identifier that is distinct to every individual—and creates a permanent and tamper-proof record of their identity.

World’s orb devices, which are roughly the size of a football, may strike some people as a form of sci-fi dystopia.

The devices, however, rely on a type of advanced cryptography that does not create a central database of individuals, but instead encrypts the identity of those it scans in a way that can’t be read by the company.