Meeting platform Zoom has announced a partnership with World, Sam Altman’s human ID verification company, to ensure that the people attending meetings are actually human 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 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. Every person on that call — except the victim — turned out to be an AI-generated deepfake. A similar attack hit a multinational firm in Singapore in 2025.

Across the board, financial losses from deepfake-enabled fraud exceeded $200 million in just the first quarter of last year, according to one estimate, and the average loss per corporate incident now tops $500,000, according to security industry reports. So while deepfake video-call fraud may not be something most people ever encounter personally, it represents a serious risk for businesses, especially those that regularly conduct high-value transactions over video.

World noted that while some efforts already exist to catch deepfakes in meetings, they are limited to analyzing video frames for telltale signs of AI manipulation. Both companies said that because video models are getting better, those frame-by-frame detection methods are increasingly unreliable.

For this new feature, World uses its World ID Deep Face tech, which takes a three-pronged approach to verifying that a participant is a real person. It cross-references a signed image taken at the time of the user’s registration through 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, at which point a “Verified Human” badge appears on that participant’s title. (Yes, life is getting weird.)

Zoom said that hosts can enable a Deep Face waiting room to require all participants to verify their identity. Participants can also request mid-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 into their workflows based on what matters most for their use case,” Zoom spokesperson Travis Isaman said via email.

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Beyond Zoom, Altman’s World has been building partnerships with a range of consumer platforms, including Tinder and Visa, for human verification. Last month, it released tech to verify that real humans, rather than automated AI programs, are behind AI shopping agents at the point of purchase.

Topics

Apps, meetings, sam altman, World, zoom

Ivan Mehta

Ivan covers global consumer tech developments at TechCrunch. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web.

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Zoom teams up with World to verify humans in meetings