World launches tool to verify humans behind AI shopping agents

9:10 PM IST · March 17, 2026

World, co-founded by Sam Altman, is dedicated to creating what it calls “proof of human” tech—ID verification tools for an internet increasingly overrun by AI-generated content of dubious quality. The connection isn’t lost that Altman’s other company, OpenAI,has been widely blamedfor creating a whole lot of that slop (though one could argue he saw the problem coming when he founded World). This week, Tools for Humanity (“TFH”), the startup behind World, released the beta of a new verification tool—this one designed to support the build-out of agentic commerce, the fast-growing practice of using AI programs to browse the web and make purchases on a user’s behalf. More and more consumers are using AI agents to surf websites and buy stuff for them. The trend promises a certain amount of automated convenience, but it has also raised the specter ofnew forms of fraud, spam, and other forms of large-scale internet abuse. On Tuesday, World announced its purported solution: AgentKit, a software development tool geared toward commercial websites that allows for the inclusion of a new verification system that let’s those sites verify a real human is behind an agent’s purchasing decisions. AgentKit relies on World ID, which is the linchpin of TFH’s verification system. The most secure version of the ID is derived from a scan of a user’s eyes via World’sOrb device. The Orb converts an iris into a unique and encrypted digital code—the verified World ID—which can then be used to access TFH’s ecosystem of services via the company’s World app. AgentKit allows a user’s World ID to be integrated into a recently launched payment system known asthe x402 protocol. Developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare, x402 is a blockchain-based open standard to allow automated computer programs totransact with each otherdirectly online — without human intervention at each step. To use AgentKit, users merely register their AI agents with their World ID, which then communicates to websites—via the x402 system—that a distinct and verified human approves of the agent’s purchasing decisions. “AgentKit is built as a complementary extension to the x402 v2 protocol, in coordination with Coinbase,” Tools for Humanity said in a statement. “The integration is designed so that any website already using x402 can enable proof of unique human verification alongside (or instead of) micropayments.” In an interview with TechCrunch, TFH Chief Product Officer, Tiago Sada, compared the new function to delegating “power of attorney” to an agent. By verifying that the AI program is acting on behalf of a particular user, a website can decide whether to trust the transactions initiated by those agents or not, Sada said. “What the World ID badge tells you is that someone is a real and a unique human,” he said, noting that websites can still choose to block particular users they think are operating in bad faith. AgentKit is currently being offered in beta to developers, with the hope that feedback will refine it over time. Sada also noted that consumers will need to have a verified World ID, derived from an Orb scan, to qualify for this kind of verification. It’s a timely move. Major e-commerce sites and financial services have already begun embracing agentic commerce. Last year, companies likeAmazonandMasterCardintroduced automated buying capabilities to their platforms, and Google recentlylaunched its own protocoldesigned to support the trend. As the field grows, the industry is obviously going to want safeguards that ensure it remains reliable and stable. World is clearly attempting to position itself as the de facto provider of that stability.

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Riding an AI rally, Robinhood preps second retail venture IPO

Just two months after listing its first venture fund on the stock market, Robinhood is preparing to launch a second. The company hasfiled aconfidential registrationfor RVII, a standard regulatory step that allows it to work through the approval process before making details public. Unlike its first fund, which currently holds stakes in10 late-stage companies— Airwallex, Boom, Databricks, ElevenLabs, Mercor, OpenAI, Oura, Ramp, Revolut, and Stripe— RVII will cast a wider net, investing in growth-stage and early-stage startups.It’s a meaningful distinction, given that early-stage startups are younger and carry more risk but also offer the potential for greater returns. The fundraising target for RVII has not yet been set, the company said in ablog post. For its inaugural fund, Robinhood sought to raise $1 billion but ultimately fellseveral hundred million shortof that goal. Despite the shortfall, the first fund has performed strongly. RVI — the ticker for Robinhood’s first fund, which trades on the NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) — debuting on the NYSE at $21 a share in early March and has since more than doubled, closing on Monday at $43.69. Market enthusiasm for the AI prospects of the fund’s underlying startups has likely fueled the stock’s rise. The premise behind both funds addresses a longstanding gap in who gets to invest in startups. Under federal rules, only “accredited” investors — those with a net worth exceeding $1 million or annual income above $200,000 — can put money into private companies. That has historically locked ordinary investors out of the earliest and most lucrative stages of a company’s growth. RVI and now RVII, are designed to change that, letting anyone invest in a portfolio of private startups through a regular brokerage account. “You can think of [Robinhood Ventures] as a publicly traded venture capital firm with daily liquidity. No accreditation requirements and no carry,” Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said in aninterviewat The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything conference last week. Daily liquidity means shares can be bought or sold any day the market is open, unlike traditional VC funds, where capital is locked up for years. No carry means Robinhood doesn’t take a percentage of investment profits, as conventional venture firms typically do. Over the past few years, the most valuable AI startups have gone from early bets to companies worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and almost all of that appreciation has happened in the private markets, out of reach for most investors. Tenev's longer-term vision goes further still. “The aspiration is, if you’re a company raising a seed round and a Series A round — so, just first capital — retail should be a big chunk of that round, much like it now is in the public markets,” Tenevsaid at the conference. “And we should let those people in at the ground floor, so that they can actually benefit from this potential appreciation that’s increasingly happening in the private markets.” If that vision takes hold, it could fundamentally change how startups raise their earliest capital, with retail investors eventually sitting alongside venture firms, including in the earliest rounds, where the biggest returns are often made, a whole lot of money is lost, as well.

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There aren’t enough rockets for space data centers — Cowboy Space raised $275M to build them

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Digg tries again, this time as an AI news aggregator

Digg is back from the dead. Again. Just months afterlaunching, therebootof Kevin Rose’s once-popular link-sharing siteshut down in March, as the company shifted course. Originally redesigned as acompetitorto the massive community forum site Reddit, the new Digg found that it wasn’t able to effectively manage the bot traffic invading its platform and hadn’t differentiated itself enough from the competition to make an impact. The startup laid off staff and said it was time to go back to the drawing board. Rose, a partner at True Ventures, returned to work full-time on a new version of Digg in April. On Friday evening, the founderprevieweda link to the newly redesignedDigg, which now looks nothing like a Reddit clone and more like the news aggregator it once was. a little project i've been hacking on:https://t.co/zTuwWy44lybugs expected. more topics soon. This time around, the site is focused on ranking news — specifically, AI news to start. In an email to beta testers, the company said the site’s goal is to “track the most influential voices in a space” and to surface the news that’s actually worth “paying attention to.” AI is the area it’s testing this idea with, but if successful, Digg will expand to include other topics. The email warned that the site was still raw and “buggy,” and was designed more to give users a first look than to serve as its public debut. On the current homepage, Digg showcases four main stories at the top: the most viewed story, a story seeing rising discussion, the fastest-climbing story, and one “In case you missed it” headline. Below that is a ranked list of top stories for the day, complete with engagement metrics like views, comments, likes, and saves. But the twist is that these metrics aren’t the ones generated on Digg itself. Instead, Digg is ingesting content from X in real-time to determine what’s being discussed, while also performing sentiment analysis, clustering, and signal detection to determine what matters most. As Roseremarked on X,when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman engages with a story about AI, it almost always sets off a chain reaction that includes deep discussion and propagation of that topic throughout X. The new Digg will be able to track that increased engagement. This might be something that’s interesting to data nerds, as it exposes the impact of X-based engagement with charts and graphs, and offers a way to track signal among what can, on X, often be a lot of noise. But it’s unclear whether there’s enough underlying value here for an everyday user, beyond seeing that yes, a@samatweet can make something go viral. The site also ranks the top 1,000 people involved in AI, as well as the top companies and the top politicians focused on AI issues. For those who don’t have time to spend on X tracking breaking AI news, Digg could prove a useful resource. But it’s not clear why people would regularly turn to Digg over their preferred news app, RSS reader, or even their X “For You” feed, if they wanted to catch up on what’s trending — especially because there isn’t currently any discussion happening on Digg’s site itself. Digg may also struggle when it moves on to other topics, as AI news is one of the few areas where discussion still heavily takes place on X. Other verticals don’t have the same traction, especially after Musk’s takeover of the site formerly known as Twitter gave rise to an ecosystem of competitors, which now includes Meta’s creator-focused Threads. Many non-tech-related discussions are now happening off X, or off the public internet entirely. However, if Digg does end up gaining steam, it could serve as a useful source of website traffic to publishers whose businesses have been decimated bydeclining clicksthanks to Google’s changing algorithms andthe impact of AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries Google displays atop search results, which often answer users’ questions before they ever click through to a website.

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OpenAI Launches $4 Billion Deployment Company Backed by Top Investors

The Deployment Company will function as a standalone business unit while remaining closely connected to OpenAI’s research and product teams.

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