How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer

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Andreessen Horowitz

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4.4 • 66 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg speak with Alex Blania of Tools for Humanity about World and the growing need for proof of human verification online. They discuss the challenge of proving human uniqueness at scale, the privacy model behind World ID, and why platforms from social media to dating apps to video conferencing may soon need stronger ways to verify that users are real people.

Transcript

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0:00.0	How do you prove somebody is human?
0:02.0	It is a surprisingly hard problem.
0:04.0	I think that people are going to start getting accused of being bots.
0:08.0	What we currently see is less than 1% of what it will look like in probably a year or two.
0:12.0	The idea that AGI will lead to some very fundamental shift.
0:16.0	It seems obvious.
0:18.0	The AIs are really good at programming humans.
0:20.0	Much better than humans are at programming AIs.
0:22.3	Absolutely.
0:22.8	An AI will be able to have a GitHub account and will be able to post and also attest to
0:26.9	five other AIs that these are in fact humans and even though they're not.
0:29.9	Honestly, if you don't take it serious now.
0:43.8	Alex, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you. Thanks for having me. So proof of human is having a moment right now.
0:48.8	When you first give a background for people who are unfamiliar, what is the moment that's happening?
0:52.1	And how did we get here? Yeah. And what is proof of human?
0:56.1	Proof of human, as the name suggests, is, you know,
1:00.3	do you know if you interact with a human or like something else on the internet?
1:03.8	And I actually think the kinds of questions that we're now asking is,
1:08.8	are you interacting with a human, an agent on behalf of a human,
1:10.4	or just an agent?
1:10.8	I think these are like roughly the three areas that we want to split apart.
1:15.6	Well, and describe a little bit the difference between just an agent and an agent acting on behalf of a human.
	...

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