Muse, dots, Instinct, and the question every agent will be asked

AI agents such as Meta's Muse, OpenAI's dots, and Instinct put the power of personal assistants in the hands of consumers. As they gain widespread adoption, websites and services will ask which agent is making a request and whether a real person originated the action. World ID lets an agent answer the second question while the person’s personal information stays private.

What is Muse?

Personal AI agents that act on behalf of individuals are becoming mainstream. Last month, Meta launched Muse, an agent that performs tasks like sending emails, booking travel, completing forms, and making purchases. 

What are dots?

Three weeks after Muse arrived, OpenAI launched dots: always-on AI agents that operate in the background on cloud-based computers. They can connect to more than 4,000 apps. The company envisions "teams of dots working together on your behalf."

What is Instinct? 

Instinct is an invite-only personal assistant that is gaining rapid adoption. The service does not require an app and is instead activated via text messages sent from your phone or computer. 

Why Proof of Human matters to Muse, dots, and Instinct

Proof of Human is a way for someone to verify that they are a real, unique person without revealing who they are. An individual can extend their Proof of Human to their personal agents as they complete tasks via websites and apps that are designed for humans. This new paradigm has already produced friction. Shortly after launch, Amazon blocked Muse from shopping on its website, noting, among other objections, that the agent did not disclose that it was an AI agent while browsing, as Amazon's rules require. 

As agents become more prevalent, websites and services will need to know what they are dealing with. That requires attribution. First, agents need to indicate where they are coming from and, ideally, who built them. The next step is establishing whether a real person stands behind the agent, which is where Proof of Human comes in.

Proof of Human is critical for a simple reason: The number of people on the planet is finite, roughly eight billion, while the number of AI agents is unlimited. Counting the people behind those agents matters for rate limiting (the number of queries an agent can make on behalf of a person), sales (the number of people interested in a product), and allocations (the number of products each person can buy). 

How World ID helps

World ID lets a person present a variety of Proofs to third parties about themselves, including Proof of Human. Individuals can also delegate their Proofs to their agents, resulting in human-backed verified AI agents. 

Proof of Human is stored in World ID app and uses zero-knowledge proofs to maintain privacy. When a Proof is delegated to an agent, websites and services can then verify that agent is acting on behalf of a person and set limits accordingly. Verified agents help increase trust and security for daily interactions.

Verified agents are:

• Private: No personal information is shared when a person or their agent presents a Proof.
• Unique: The Proof belongs to a person, and each person is counted once. Someone can control thousands of agents and still be counted as one human.
• Neutral: World ID is built on an open protocol, so it can work with agents created by any party, for any verified human, on any platform.

Verified agents in the real world

World is building out use cases that show why Proof of Human is important. One involves limited product releases, where each purchase must come from an agent representing a unique person: one human, one agent, one allocation. Another is human in the loop, where a person is prompted to approve an action before the agent completes it. If your AI agent wants to make a sizeable purchase or execute an agreement, you can verify that you approved it.

Building with World ID for Agents

Organizations are putting these tools to work. Okta has an early access beta of Human Principal, a service that can use World ID to verify that a real human stands behind an AI agent. Vercel is integrating World's human in the loop into its Workflow SDK, which lets developers add a World ID check to confirm a human approved a step in a workflow. Exa provided 100 free API requests per month to verified humans, shared across all the agents they back. Browserbase plans to use World ID so that human-verified agents can navigate websites with fewer blocks. These use cases were demonstrated at Lift Off.

What’s next

As agents proliferate and superintelligence advances, more websites and services will ask the same question: is a real person behind this request? Agents that cannot answer are likely to be blocked, which creates friction and frustration for the person who sent them. Proof of Human gives them an answer, and World's AgentKit, currently in beta, offers tools to build that answer into agents. 

Visit world.org/world-id to learn more about World ID or docs.world.org to start building with World.