😺 Watch: This company has a fix for bots taking over the internet
The Neuron · Grant Harvey · 2026-06-03
The Neuron interviews Tools for Humanity CPO Tiago Sada about World ID, a biometric human-verification system using iris scanning and zero-knowledge proofs to prove real human presence online without storing personal images, framed as essential infrastructure as AI-driven bots overwhelm traditional authentication.
Appears in
Extraction
Topics: digital-identityproof-of-humanzero-knowledge-proofsai-botsagentic-ai
Claims
- Traditional bot detection methods like CAPTCHAs are obsolete because AI can now solve them, generate fake selfies, and forge identity documents.
- World ID verifies human uniqueness using iris scanning combined with anonymized multi-party computation, so the platform does not retain biometric images after verification.
- Zero-knowledge proofs allow apps to confirm a user is a unique human without exposing the same identity token across different services.
- Future AI agents acting on behalf of users will require agentic delegation systems so websites can distinguish authorized bots from malicious ones.
- Using AI to detect AI bots creates an unsustainable arms race because next-generation models train specifically against existing detectors.
Key quotes
It's very hard for me to imagine a world where AI advances as much as I think it will over the next 10 years and the internet doesn't completely break without something like this.
World ran a human-only concert in San Francisco and says hundreds of thousands of bots tried to get in.
Tiago explains 'agentic delegation,' where your AI agent can show up to a website and prove it is acting for you.