Zoom is working with the world to verify people in meetings

Meeting platform Zoom has announced a partnership with World, Sam Altman’s human identity verification company, to ensure that people attending meetings are actually people and not AI-generated imposters.

The threat is real and growing fast. The most dramatic example came in early 2024, when engineering firm Arup lost 25 million dollars after an employee in Hong Kong authorized a series of wire transfers during a routine video call with the company’s CFO and several colleagues. Every person 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.

In general, economic losses from deepfake fraud exceeded 200 million dollars just the first quarter of last year, according to one estimate, and the average loss per corporate incident now tops $500,000according to security industry reports. So, while deepfake video calling fraud may not be something most people ever experience personally, it is a serious risk for businesses, especially those that regularly conduct high-value video transactions.

World noted that while there are already some efforts to catch deep fakes in meetings, they are limited to analyzing video frames for telltale signs of AI manipulation. Both companies said that as video models get better, these frame-by-frame detection methods are increasingly unreliable.

For this new feature, World uses World ID Deep Face technology, which takes a three-pronged approach to verify that a participant is a real person. Refers to a signed image captured at the time of user registration via the World’s Orb device, a real-time face scan from the user’s device, and a live video frame visible to other meeting participants. It only verifies someone when all three things match, so a “Verified Person” badge appears in that participant’s title. (Yes, life gets weird.)

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

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

Beyond Zoom, Altman’s World has partnered with a number of consumer platforms, including Tinder and Visa, for human verification. Last month, it released technology to verify that real people, not automated AI programs, are behind AI purchasing agents at the point of purchase.