That dream of a decentralized privacy-retaining identity system able to combat AI-driven bots and deepfakes may not be as elusive as feared – courtesy of Tools for Humanity (TfH) and Worldcoin.

The Worldcoin/TfH identity solution is not a traditional identity system. It contains no personal information – instead it simply and irrefutably confirms that this person is a living person and not a bot.

TfH is a non-profit organization founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Alex Blania in 2010. Its CISO is Adrian Ludwig, who was Atlassian’s CISO for five years and director of Android Security at Google for six years. The firm has raised a total of $115 million through venture capital funding.

Worldcoin is technically under the stewardship of the Worldcoin Foundation, an exempted limited guarantee foundation company incorporated in the Cayman Islands. For all practical purposes it would be fair to think of Worldcoin as a project being developed by TfH but with potential future business flexibility.

Worldcoin’s purpose in proving humanity

It is easy to consider malware as the scourge of the online world. But if you apply the concept of reductionism, you find a deeper and more fundamental problem below: the bots and fake accounts that distribute the threats. The real problem for security defenders is not who you are, but what you are: are you human or not? SecurityWeek talked to Adrian Ludwig for a better understanding.

“There’s a small number of bad actors that develop pieces of malware, but they’re able to make tons and tons of accounts,” explains Ludwig. “So, they’re able to hide behind having all of these fake identities and use them to deliver their malware.”

That basic pattern plays out everywhere across the internet. “You see it in social media where people produce bot accounts and try to sway public opinion. You see it in dating sites, where people create dozens of different dating profiles, and try to use them to manipulate the results in ways that can often be abusive.”