OpenAI joins FIDO Alliance to help AI agent authentication push

OpenAI is the newest member of the FIDO Alliance, joining the passwordless authentication group to contribute to its efforts to provide the secure and private digital identity frameworks that will be needed to ensure AI agents are trustworthy, verified and governed by user intent.

Within FIDO, OpenAI plans “to participate in emerging work to evolve authentication for agentic intelligence,” according to a LinkedIn post.

OpenAI shuttered its Sora 2 AI video generator in March after receiving criticism for its contribution to a wave of impersonation and abuse videos. But the company also launched an AI agent tool Operator in January, so it is keen to ensure agents are trusted enough to be commercially useful.

Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman’s other big tech project, World, uses iris biometrics for enrollment, and is geared towards proving that a person is human and unique from other users.

FIDO Alliance CEO Andrew Shikiar says the introduction of agentic AI represents a new era for authentication. The adoption of digital credentials like FIDO’s passkeys is accelerating, while agents are beginning to interact with services, transact and make decisions on behalf of users.

“The common thread is clear: making it simple and trustworthy for people to present verified credentials, whether directly or through agents acting on their behalf,” Shikiar says in a LinkedIn post of his own.

OpenAI is also joining the Alliance’s Board of Directors, which Shikiar says “reflects a broader market coalescing around the need to align authentication, credentials, and AI, grounded in open standards and real-world deployment.”

Shikiar said in a keynote at the Identity Policy Forum earlier this year that integrating authentication with workflows for AI agents will be one of the major themes of 2026.

The FIDO Alliance joined OpenID’s conformance testing program just weeks ago.

Article Topics

AI agents  |  authentication  |  biometrics  |  digital identity  |  FIDO Alliance  |  OpenAI  |  proof of personhood