The race to tell humans from AI agents

retained text

The future of agentic commerce hinges on the ability to know whether it’s a human or an AI agent that’s making a purchase, and the tools to do that are arriving fast.
Proof-of-human technology, which can let a person vouch for the AI agents acting on their behalf, could keep bad bots off of websites without forcing platforms to block all of them. But it also opens up new possibilities for how business gets done online.
World, the startup co-founded by Sam Altman that scans people’s irises to verify they’re human, this week announced new tools that let people link their proof of humanity to an AI agent.
The company’s product chief Tiago Sada told me that could eventually lead to online sellers offering perks to verified agents, such as discounts and free trials. “If you know that an agent is coming from a human, you can actually be much more generous,” Sada said.
E-commerce may get comfortable with agent transactions before other industries. Several large US banks are restricting interaction with third-party agents, in part because they can’t tell which ones a customer actually authorized, Axios reported.

document fetched 2026-10-24 15:22 · canonical https://semafor.com/article/10/23/2026/the-race-to-tell-humans-from-ai-agents