World ID, developed by Tools for Humanity—the iris-scanning company co-founded by Sam Altman—powers a credential that proves humanity on the web. It uses a device called an Orb to capture images of a person’s face and eyes, then converts those images into a numeric string stored on the user’s device to verify that they are human.
World ID and Coinbase collaborated to introduce a solution for the agentic web that provides proof that agents have a human behind them. AgentKit is a developer toolkit that enables verified humans to delegate their World ID to AI agents, creating “human-backed agents” with an added layer of trust for interactions and transactions.
AgentKit is available in limited beta to developers who are building agents and hold a verified World ID. Coinbase debuted x402 in May, an open standard that embeds stablecoin payments into web interactions.
By integrating World ID with the x402 protocol, developers now have a complete trust stack: a way for agents to pay for what they need and a way for platforms to verify there is a real human behind the wallet. Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of x402, said, “Payments are the how of agentic commerce, but the identity is the who,” underscoring the shift toward human-backed agents. This is a massive step toward a web where agents aren’t just seen as automated traffic, but as legitimate economic participants.
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