World proposes a web-based verification test that allows people to delegate their identity to an AI agent

World has announced that it is working on a new tool for identify autonomous agents that have people behind them with a unique human identity, which will be linked to the x402 protocol of the web.

The current website lives traffic coming from human internet users but also automated systems which in recent years have proliferated as crawlers, that is, they access web pages to collect the content on them, whether text, images or structured data, in order to use it in the training of artificial intelligence models.

The increasing presence of AI agents, with the ability to move around the web autonomously on behalf of users, poses the challenge of distinguish this new type of automated traffic.

Technology firm World (formerly known as Worldcoin) proposes to provide a unique human identity proof which allows a person to delegate their identification to their agent. With this measure, websites can “know that there is a real and unique person behind an agent without needing to know who that person is”, as he explains in a statement shared on his blog.

World is already working on said proof of identity based on its World ID verification system and an ‘AgentKit’ that it develops together with Coinbase to make it a complement to the x402 protocol. The latter, created by Coinbase and Cloudflare, introduces micropayments for agents who want to access resources on web pages.

The World ID user can register their agent using a standard World ID verification so that when this agent accesses a website with the x402 protocol, it can “request a payment or proof of identity that proves the identity of the person behind the agent. If the agent presents valid proof, access is granted,” he explains.

AgentKit is currently available in limited beta for developers who are already building agents and have a verified World ID.