Artificial intelligence has significantly reduced the cost of large-scale operations, but it has made trust difficult to establish, while blockchain technology can reshape the trust system.

Written by: a16z

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

Artificial intelligence systems are disrupting the internet, which was originally designed on a human scale. It has brought the costs of collaboration and transactions down to historic lows, and the generated voice, video, and text are increasingly difficult to distinguish from human behavior. We are already troubled by CAPTCHA, and now, AI agents are beginning to interact and transact like humans.

The key issue is not the existence of AI, but the lack of a native mechanism on the internet that can distinguish between humans and machines while protecting privacy and ensuring usability.

This is where blockchain technology comes into play. The idea that cryptography can help create better AI systems, and conversely, that AI can empower cryptography, is backed by deep logic; here, we summarize several reasons why AI needs blockchain now more than ever.

Increasing the Cost of AI Impersonation

AI can forge voices, facial features, writing styles, video content, and even create complete social personas, all while achieving large-scale operations: a single agent can transform into thousands of accounts, simulating different opinions, consumers, or voters, and the cost of this operation continues to decrease.

Such impersonation tactics are not new: any scheming fraudster has always been able to hire voice actors, forge calls, or send phishing texts. The real change lies in the cost: the threshold for implementing such fraudulent attacks on a large scale has significantly lowered.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of online services default to "one account corresponds to one real user." When this premise fails, all subsequent systems will collapse. Detection-based countermeasures (like CAPTCHAs) ultimately cannot escape the fate of becoming ineffective, because the pace of AI evolution far exceeds that of detection technologies designed specifically to counter it.

So how can blockchain play a role? A decentralized human proof or identity verification system allows users to easily complete single identity verification while fundamentally preventing multiple identities for one person. For example, scanning an iris to obtain a global identity identifier may be simple and economical, but obtaining a second identifier is nearly impossible.

By limiting the number of identity identifiers issued and increasing the marginal cost for attackers, blockchain makes it difficult for AI to achieve large-scale impersonation operations.

AI can forge content, but cryptography prevents it from easily faking a unique human identity at a very low cost. By reshaping scarcity at the identity layer, blockchain raises the marginal cost of impersonation while not adding extra friction to normal human usage.

Building a Decentralized Human Identity Verification System

One way to prove human identity is through digital identity identifiers, which encompass all the information people can use to verify their identity: usernames, personal identification codes, passwords, as well as third-party proofs (like citizenship, credit qualifications) and other relevant credentials.

What value can cryptography add? The answer is decentralization. Any centralized identity system at the core of the internet can become a failure point for the entire system. When AI agents conduct transactions, communicate, and collaborate on behalf of humans, whoever controls the identity verification rights effectively controls the right to participate. Centralized issuers can arbitrarily revoke user permissions, charge fees, or even assist in monitoring activities.

Decentralization completely reverses this pattern: users, rather than platform gatekeepers, control their identity information, making identity identifiers more secure and resistant to censorship.

Unlike traditional identity systems, a decentralized human proof mechanism allows users to autonomously control and safeguard their identity information, completing human identity verification in a privacy-protecting, absolutely neutral manner.

Creating a Portable Universal "Digital Passport" for AI Agents

AI agents do not exist solely on a single platform: a single agent can appear simultaneously across various chat applications, email conversations, phone communications, browser sessions, and application interfaces. However, there is currently no reliable mechanism to confirm that interactions in these different contexts all come from the same AI agent with the same status, capabilities, and authorized by the "owner."

Moreover, if the identity of an AI agent is tied only to a specific platform or market, it cannot be used in other products and important scenarios. This leads to a fragmented user experience for AI agents, and the process of adapting to different scenarios is cumbersome and inefficient.

A blockchain-based identity layer can create a portable universal "digital passport" for AI agents. These identity identifiers can link to the agent's capabilities, permissions, and payment terminal information, and can be verified in any scenario, significantly increasing the difficulty of impersonating AI agents. This also allows developers to create more practical AI agents, providing a better user experience: agents can operate across multiple ecosystems without the worry of being tied to a specific platform.

Achieving Scalable Payment Transactions

As AI agents increasingly represent humans in transactions, existing payment systems have become a clear bottleneck. Scalable AI payments require new infrastructure support, specifically a micropayment system capable of handling small transactions from multiple sources.

Currently, many blockchain-based tools, such as rollup scaling solutions, layer two networks, AI-native financial institutions, and financial infrastructure protocols, show potential in solving this problem, enabling near-zero-cost transactions and more refined payment splits.

The key is that these blockchain payment infrastructures can support machine-scale transactions, including micropayments, high-frequency interactions, and commercial transactions between agents, all of which traditional financial systems cannot handle.

• Micropayments can be split among multiple data providers, triggering small payments to all relevant data providers with a single user interaction through automated smart contracts;
• Smart contracts support enforceable retrospective payments based on completed transactions, compensating entities that provided information support for purchasing decisions after the transaction is completed, with the entire process being fully transparent and traceable;
• Blockchain can achieve complex and programmable payment split distributions, ensuring fair distribution of earnings through rules enforced by code rather than relying on centralized decision-making, establishing trustless financial relationships between autonomous agents.

Protecting Privacy and Security in AI Systems

Many security systems contain a paradox: the more data collected to protect users, the easier it becomes for AI to impersonate user identities.

In this context, privacy protection and security defense become the same issue. The challenge we face is to ensure that human identity verification systems default to having privacy protection attributes, hiding sensitive information at all stages, ensuring that only real humans can provide the relevant information needed to prove their identity.

A blockchain-based system combined with zero-knowledge proof technology can allow users to prove specific facts, such as personal identification codes, ID numbers, and qualification standards, without disclosing the underlying raw data (like the address on a driver's license).

This way, the application can obtain the necessary identity verification assurance, while the AI system is deprived of the raw data needed for impersonation. Privacy protection is no longer an added feature but the core defense against AI impersonation.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence has significantly reduced the cost of large-scale operations, but it has made trust difficult to establish. Blockchain technology can reshape the trust system: raising the cost of impersonation, preserving human-scale interaction models, achieving decentralization of identity systems, making privacy protection a default setting, and providing AI agents with inherent economic constraints.

If we want to create an internet where AI agents can operate normally without destroying trust, then blockchain is not an option but a key underlying technology for building an AI-native internet, a core element currently missing from the internet.

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