How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer

**Ben Horowitz** (0:00)
We'll prove somebody is human.

**Alex Blania** (0:01)
It is a surprisingly hard problem.

**Ben Horowitz** (0:03)
I think that people are going to start getting accused of being bots.

**Alex Blania** (0:07)
What we currently see is less than 1% of what it will look like in probably a year or two. The idea that AGI will lead to some very fundamental shift seems obvious.

**Ben Horowitz** (0:17)
The AIs are really good at programming humans. Much better than humans are at programming AIs.

**Alex Blania** (0:22)
Absolutely. The AI will be able to have a GitHub account, and will be able to post, and also attest to five other AIs that these are in fact humans, even though they're not. Honestly, if you don't take it serious now...

**Erik Torenberg** (0:38)
Alex, welcome to the podcast. Great to have you.

**Alex Blania** (0:40)
Thanks for having me.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:41)
So Proof of Human is having a moment right now. When you first give a background for people who are unfamiliar, what is the moment that's happening and how did we get here?

**Ben Horowitz** (0:50)
Yeah. And what is Proof of Human?

**Alex Blania** (0:52)
Proof of Human, as the name suggests, is do you know if you interact with a human or something else on the Internet?
And I actually think the kinds of questions that we're now asking is, are you interacting with a human, an agent on behalf of a human, or just an agent? I think these are roughly the three areas that we want to split apart.

**Ben Horowitz** (1:15)
Well, and describe a little bit the difference between just an agent and an agent acting on behalf of a human. How do you see that distinction?

**Alex Blania** (1:23)
Yeah. So quickly explaining just the term Proof of Human, and I think what is hard about it, then I will explain how that fits into an agent on behalf of a human. So what Proof of Human really means is that every individual that interacts on a platform has only one, ideally one account or a limited number of accounts, and stays the owner of that account. That's the property that you're looking for. So you're looking for initial verification that ideally should be something like anonymous or extremely privacy-preserving, and then ongoing authentication, that the same person remains in control of the account. Then there's some secondary properties that I think are good to have. But that actually tells you that the really hard thing is uniqueness.
What is happening on a platform like Twitter right now is that there's all these accounts, all these bots that are in the replies, that there's probably one human sitting somewhere and sending out 100,000s of AIs, and there's this catch-up game where Twitter and X are trying to just find them and block probably millions a day of these.

**Ben Horowitz** (2:38)
Which is what, like, a 100th of the bots.

**Alex Blania** (2:43)
That's right. That's how it feels like. And then agent on behalf of human, I think like how it will look like is, I think all of us will have agents. It's unclear how it will look like. Is this going to be one or there are multiple ones, maybe with different tasks and different types of characters?
And I think it will then come down to, I approve a certain action of my agent. I give him certain rights. So act on my behalf.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:12)
Okay. Post to my ex account, post to my Instagram.

**Alex Blania** (3:16)
For example.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:16)
But it's my Instagram and I'm a unique human that owns it.

**Alex Blania** (3:20)
That's right. And that ex or Instagram could decide if that's actually something they want as a platform. Right.
But that's how you could do it.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:29)
That makes sense. And so how do you, how do you prove somebody is human?

**Alex Blania** (3:37)
It is a surprisingly hard problem.

**Ben Horowitz** (3:39)
Yeah. So, you know, those agents are very, very clever.

**Alex Blania** (3:45)
It's funny. We started this company now a couple of years ago, before Chetjipiti and before all of that. But we kind of took that as an assumption that eventually we will have AIs that both pass the Turing test, so they can just claim to be a human, you will not be able to tell it anymore on the Internet. And also that they would be highly agentic and just like run around to their own thing. And so that makes it really, really hard because back then when we started the company, there were like roughly three big ideas that people were interested in. One was this idea of Web of Trust or like related idea. So this idea that you look how someone behaves on the Internet or did behave in the past. So like usually a combination of you have the certain number of accounts that you own since a couple of years, and then you post regularly or you comment regularly to GitHub. Like these were the kinds of things that people are using. Then let's say all three of us have them, and then I attest also that I know you in the real world, and I attest to you that I know you in the real world, and that's how you would build a certain graph.