a16z: Why does AI urgently need encryption technology?

The trust crisis in AI can only be resolved by encryption technology.

Author: a16z

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

Artificial intelligence systems are disrupting the internet, which was originally designed for human scale. They are reducing the cost of collaboration and transactions to historic lows, and the voice, video, and text they generate are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from human behavior. We are already troubled by human-machine verification, and now, AI agents are beginning to interact and transact like humans.

The crux of the problem is not the existence of artificial intelligence, but the lack of a native mechanism on the internet that can distinguish between humans and machines while protecting privacy and ensuring ease of use.

This is precisely where blockchain technology comes in. The idea that encryption technology helps create better artificial intelligence systems, and conversely, artificial intelligence can also empower encryption technology, is based on many deep-seated logics. Here, we summarize several reasons why artificial intelligence needs blockchain more than ever before.

Increase the cost of AI impersonation

Artificial intelligence can fake voice, facial features, writing style, video content, and even create complete social personas, and it can be operated on a large scale: a single intelligent agent can impersonate thousands of accounts, simulating different viewpoints, consumers, or voters, and the cost of this operation continues to decrease.

This type of impersonation is nothing new: any fraudster with malicious intent has always been able to hire voice actors, forge phone numbers, and send phishing text messages. The real change lies in the cost: today, the barrier to large-scale implementation of these fraudulent attacks has been significantly lowered.

Meanwhile, most online services assume that "one account corresponds to one real user." When this premise is not met, the entire subsequent system will collapse. Detection-based countermeasures (such as human verification) will ultimately fail because the evolution of artificial intelligence far outpaces detection technologies specifically designed to counter it.

So how can blockchain function? Decentralized human verification or identity verification systems allow users to easily complete single identity verification, while fundamentally preventing one person from having multiple identities. For example, it may be simple and economical for users to obtain a global identity by scanning their iris, but obtaining a second identity is virtually impossible.

By limiting the number of identity tokens issued and increasing the marginal cost for attackers, blockchain makes it difficult for artificial intelligence to carry out large-scale impersonation operations.

Artificial intelligence can forge content, but encryption technology prevents it from forging a unique human identity at extremely low cost. Blockchain, by reshaping scarcity at the identity layer, both increases the marginal cost of impersonation and does not add additional resistance to normal human use.

Building a decentralized human identity verification system

One way to prove human identity is through digital identity tokens, which encompass all the information people can use to verify their identity: username, personal identification number, password, and third-party verification (such as citizenship, creditworthiness) and other relevant credentials.

What value does encryption technology add? The answer is decentralization. Any centralized identity system at the core of the internet can become a point of failure for the entire system. When AI agents represent humans in transactions, communication, and collaboration, whoever controls the right to verify identity effectively controls the right to participate. Centralized issuers can arbitrarily revoke user permissions, charge fees, and even assist in surveillance activities.

Decentralization has completely reversed this pattern: users, rather than platform gatekeepers, control their own identity information, making identity verification more secure and resistant to censorship.

Unlike traditional identity systems, decentralized human verification mechanisms allow users to control and safeguard their own identity information and complete human verification in a privacy-protecting and absolutely neutral manner.

Creating a portable, universal "digital passport" for AI agents.

AI agents do not exist on a single platform: an intelligent agent can appear simultaneously in various chat applications, email conversations, phone calls, browser sessions, and application programming interfaces (APIs). However, there is currently no reliable mechanism to confirm that interactions in these different scenarios all originate from the same AI agent with the same state and capabilities, and authorized by its "owner."

Furthermore, if the identity of an AI agent is tied to only one platform or marketplace, it will be unable to be used in other products and important scenarios. This results in a fragmented user experience for AI agents, and the process of adapting them to specific scenarios is cumbersome and inefficient.

A blockchain-based identity layer can create portable, universal "digital passports" for AI agents. These identities can be linked 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, delivering a better user experience: the agent can run in multiple ecosystems without worrying about being tied to a specific platform.

Achieving large-scale payment transactions

As AI agents increasingly act as intermediaries in transactions on behalf of humans, existing payment systems have become a significant bottleneck. Large-scale intelligent agent payments require entirely new infrastructure—a micropayment system capable of handling small-value transactions from multiple sources.

Currently, many blockchain-based tools, such as rolling scaling solutions, layer 2 networks, AI-native financial institutions, and financial infrastructure protocols, have shown the potential to solve this problem, enabling near-zero-cost transactions and more granular payment splitting.

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

• Micropayments can be split among multiple data providers, and through automated smart contracts, a single user interaction can trigger micropayments to all relevant data providers.
• Smart contracts support enforceable retroactive payments based on completed transactions, compensating the entities that provided information to support the purchase decision after the transaction is completed, with the entire process being completely transparent and traceable;
• Blockchain enables complex and programmable payment splitting and distribution, ensuring fair distribution of profits through rules enforced by code, rather than relying on decisions made by centralized institutions, thus establishing trustless financial relationships between autonomous intelligent agents.

Protecting privacy in artificial intelligence systems

At the heart of many security systems lies a paradox: the more data collected to protect users, the easier it is for artificial intelligence to impersonate them.

In this context, privacy protection and security become the same issue. Our challenge is to ensure that human identity verification systems inherently possess privacy-preserving attributes, hiding sensitive information at every stage, and guaranteeing that only genuine humans can provide the necessary information to prove their identity.

The combination of blockchain-based systems and zero-knowledge proof technology allows users to prove specific facts, such as personal identification numbers, ID numbers, and qualification standards, without revealing the underlying raw data (such as the address on a driver's license).

In this way, application developers obtain the necessary authentication guarantees, while the AI ​​system is deprived of the raw data needed for impersonation. Privacy protection is no longer an add-on feature, but a core defense against AI impersonation.

summary

Artificial intelligence has significantly reduced the cost of large-scale operations, but it has made it difficult to establish trust. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, can reshape the trust system: it raises the cost of impersonation, retains human-scale interaction patterns, decentralizes the identity system, makes privacy protection a default setting, and gives AI agents native economic constraints.

If we want to build an internet where AI agents can function properly and without destroying trust, then blockchain is not an option, but a key underlying technology for building an AI-native internet, a core component currently missing from the internet.

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