World, the controversial human identification project backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, is foraying into the agentic AI space with its own twist. On Tuesday, World debuted the beta version of AgentKit — a developer toolkit which when used would be able to verify if a particular bot is actually being controlled by a real human.
World, in its statement said, AgentKit intends to address the challenges surrounding the acceptance of AI agents as legit economic participants and not just automated traffic. Essentially, it plans to create World IDs for AI agents being controlled by real humans.
“Without a way to verify the humans behind agents, the agentic web may never fully arrive. By extending proof of human to agents, World is helping to build the infrastructure that allows the agentic internet to grow, scale and function,” the company statement said.
On Tuesday, the official X handle of World published a flowchart to explain how exactly would its AgentKit work.
Source: X/ @WorldNetwork
World has joined forces with Coinbase to fuel AgentKit with its x402 protocol that enables AI agents to process stablecoin micropayments mainly to cover fees to access resources.
Erik Reppel, the head of engineering at Coinbase and the founder of the x402 protocol, has called this development a massive step in refining the image of AI agents in the existing economic fabric.
“Payments are the ‘how’ of agentic commerce, but identity is the ‘who.’ By integrating World ID with the x402 protocol, developers now have a complete trust stack: a way for agents to pay for what they need and a way for platforms to verify there is a real human behind the wallet,” Reppel said.
AgentKit has presently made available for a limited number of developers who hold verified World IDs and are already working in the agentic AI space.
The World project was launched in 2023 with the offering to give real humans a unique proof of personhood to keep real people distinguished from bots on the online landscape. Those who seek to acquire their proof of personhood from World need to get their eyes scanned by Orbs, devices designed specifically for the project.
Despite privacy concerns and restrictions in several countries, the World project has managed to stitch itself a tight community of over 40 million real humans.
The project has not yet confirmed a timeline by when it plans a wider, more commercial roll out of the AgentKit.