World and Coinbase Turn AI Agents Into Trusted Shoppers

World and Coinbase collaborated to introduce a solution for the agentic web that provides proof that agents have a human behind them.

The AgentKit beta is a developer toolkit that allows verified humans to delegate their World ID to AI agents so that these agents, which the companies dub “human-backed agents,” can have an added layer of trust for interactions and transactions, World said in a Tuesday (March 17) announcement.

Most websites block automated traffic to prevent malicious bots from scraping data, spamming forms or launching denial-of-service attacks, according to the announcement.

“But a growing share of agent traffic is productive,” World said in the announcement. “When your AI assistant tries to book a table at a restaurant or check flight prices on your behalf, it runs into the same wall.”

AgentKit is designed to solve this problem by combining the emerging x402 protocol developed by Coinbase and Cloudflare, which allows agents to pay small amounts to access resources, with the World ID, per the announcement.

“Payments are the ‘how’ of agentic commerce, but the identity is the ‘who,’” Erik Reppel, head of engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform and founder of x402, said in the announcement. “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. This is a massive step toward a web where agents aren’t just seen as automated traffic, but as legitimate economic participants.”

AgentKit is available in limited beta to developers who are building agents and hold a verified World ID, according to the announcement.

World ID was developed by Tools for Humanity, the iris-scanning company co-founded by Sam Altman. It uses a device called an Orb to take images of a person’s face and eyes, converts those images into a string of numbers stored on the person’s device, and enables the person to use that World ID to prove that they are human.

Coinbase debuted x402 in May, saying this open standard embeds stablecoin payments into web interactions.