Zoom partners with World to authenticate people in meetings

Meetings platform Zoom has announced a partnership with Sam Altman’s human ID verification company World to ensure that people attending meetings are actually humans and not AI-generated impostors.

This threat is real and growing rapidly. The most dramatic example occurred in early 2024, when engineering company Arup suffered a $25 million loss after an employee in Hong Kong authorized a series of wire transfers during what appeared to be a routine video call with the company’s CFO and several colleagues. Everyone on that call (except the victim) turned out to be an AI-generated deepfake. A similar attack hit a multinational company in Singapore in 2025.

By some estimates, overall financial losses due to deepfake fraud exceeded $200 million in the first quarter of last year alone, and security industry reports indicate that the average loss per company incident is now over $500,000. So while deepfake video call fraud may not be personally encountered by most people, it poses a serious risk to businesses, especially those that regularly conduct high-value transactions via video.

World noted that efforts to catch deepfakes during meetings are already underway, but are limited to analyzing video frames for telltale signs of AI manipulation. The companies said that as video models improve, frame-by-frame detection methods are becoming increasingly unreliable.

With this new feature, World uses World ID Deep Face technology, which takes a three-pronged approach to ensure participants are authentic. This cross-references the signature image taken during the user’s registration via the World’s Orb device, the real-time facial scan from the user’s device, and the live video frame displayed to other meeting participants. Only if all three conditions are met will the participant be authenticated, at which point a “Verified Human” badge will appear in the participant’s title. (Yes, life is getting weird.)

Zoom said hosts can enable Deep Face waiting rooms and require all participants to verify their identity. Participants can also request that someone verify their identity on the spot during the call.

“This integration is part of Zoom’s open ecosystem approach, giving customers more ways to build trust in their workflows based on what’s most important to their use case,” Zoom spokesperson Travis Isaman said in an email.

In addition to Zoom, Altman’s World has built partnerships with various consumer platforms for human verification, including Tinder and Visa. Last month, the company released technology that verifies that a real human, rather than an automated AI program, is behind an AI shopping agent at the time of purchase.