World, the digital identity project co-founded by OpenAI boss Sam Altman has unveiled suite of tools designed to help banks prevent deepfake fraud and AI-driven impersonation across customer accounts, employee workflows, and agents.
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World was created by Altman, Alex Blania and Max Novendstern as a project to build an identity and financial network, pitched as a way to enable "universal access to the global economy regardless of country or background" and enable "global democratic processes" in the age of AI.
The new offering is its first industry-specific push and brings together the World ID app, World ID for Zoom, and World ID for Agents, promising to give banking and financial institutions greater assurance that transactions, trades, customer requests, and even important video communications are AI-safe.
Deloitte predicts that AI-enabled fraud losses in the US could reach $40 billion by 2027, up from an estimated $12.3 billion in 2023, with financial services, where digital interactions can involve sensitive information, particularly at risk.
Altman himself said last year that it "terrifies" him that banks still use voice-based authentication methods in an era when the AI that he has helped bring into the mainstream can trick such technology.
The World ID app acts an identity wallet that gives people a secure place to claim, manage, and present a set of AI-safe human proofs needed to navigate the internet and digital services.
Meanwhile, World ID for Zoom lets users confirm that the person they are speaking with is human and not a deepfake, and World ID for Agents lets a person establish proofs about themselves and delegate them to an agent, allowing the agent to confirm those proofs to a third-party platform.
The service is separate from World's own forays onto providing financial services, the World Money app - a financial superapp, with features including wallets, payments, grants, and Mini Apps.