World (Sam Altman) Launches Iris-Scan Human Verification for AI Shopping Agents — Cryptographic Identity at the Transaction Layer

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World, the biometric identity project co-founded by Sam Altman, shipped a verification tool on March 17 designed specifically for AI agents making purchases on behalf of humans. It embeds World ID (iris-scan-backed) into agentic commerce flows so merchants can cryptographically confirm a human authorized an agent's transaction before it executes. This is the first major deployment of biometric human verification at the agent-transaction layer and directly addresses the fraud and impersonation surface area of autonomous agents.