AI is destroying the internet. Math is our only hope.

Not long ago, AI-generated content was a parlor trick — six-fingered popes and uncanny Tom Cruise lookalikes, more amusing than alarming. That era is over. The Iran conflict proved it: synthetic footage of detained American soldiers, Iranian fighter jets screaming out of underground bunkers, decimated radar installations, all fabricated, all viral, all widely believed, reaching hundreds of millions before anyone could verify a single frame.

The internet we once knew no longer exists. Where seeing once informed belief, it now prompts suspicion. We are living through a crisis of trust. And it extends far beyond what we can see with our eyes.

Brian Trunzo is the chief growth officer at Succinct Labs.

Detection doesn’t work

The intuitive response is to build better detectors; AI trained to catch AI. It doesn’t work. Anyone can break the world’s leading image detectors by adding basic blur and distortion, dropping their accuracy to as low as 4%. Detection fails for the same structural reason antivirus software never eliminated malware: the attacker always has the asymmetric advantage.

But detection’s failure is almost beside the point, because the problem has already outgrown it.

AI is no longer just generating content. It is acting. Autonomous agents are browsing the web, making purchases, publishing content, negotiating with other agents and interacting with humans, and in some cases children, who may have no idea they’re talking to a machine. And when these agents operate at scale, the failure modes are catastrophic.

An agent trained on subtly poisoned data makes small, plausible errors in medical billing that compound across a hospital network into millions of dollars in fraudulent charges. A fleet of commerce agents, optimizing for margin, systematically exploits pricing vulnerabilities their operators never intended and cannot explain resulting in billions in losses.

A butterfly that flaps its wings in a training dataset causes a tornado in the real economy.

When the damage is done, there is no receipt. An agent’s reasoning is not a chronological trace. It’s a single pass through billions of opaque parameters and its outputs are probabilistic. Ask the same question twice and you will get slightly different answers. There is no way to reconstruct a decision that builds on endlessly changing variables. No way to audit what the agent was trained on, what instructions it followed, or why it did what it did.

Web3’s instinct was correct: we need a way to replace faith with guarantees. But ownership alone wasn’t going to get us there. AI and agents make that clear. The question isn’t who owns the platform. It’s whether you can trust who and what is acting on it. Tokens were the wrong primitive; proofs are the right one.

In an agentic internet, counterparties, whether human or machine, need guarantees: who built this system, what data shaped it, what constraints govern it, whether it is authorized to act. Those guarantees must hold even when the underlying systems are proprietary. Especially then.

Zero-knowledge cryptography makes this possible by binding the commitments upfront. A developer can cryptographically fingerprint their training data, allowing ZK proofs to verify identity, provenance, training data and operational constraints without exposing underlying data. Not “trust me,” but “prove it.”

This is no longer just a consumer protection question. It is a matter of national security.

Deepfakes were the pregame. Agents are the main event. Foreign adversaries will not stop at manipulating what Americans see — they will deploy agents to manipulate how they act. They will deploy autonomous systems that transact in our markets, interface with our institutions, and engage our children, with no way for any counterparty to verify what they are or who authorized them. This is solvable. But only if America builds the rails before adversaries learn to exploit their absence.

Policy should follow. Congress should require that high-risk AI agents, like those handling financial transactions or interacting with minors, carry cryptographic proofs of who they are, who authorized them, and what they’re allowed to do, verifiable by any counterparty without revealing proprietary information. The same logic should extend to what those agents do: as agents begin transacting on behalf of people and businesses at machine speed and machine scale, every consequential action — a payment, a contract, a trade, a data exchange — should carry a proof of who authorized it and under what constraints.

The technical foundations are already being laid: the U.S. Department of Commerce, by way of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is exploring the standardization of zero-knowledge through its Privacy-Enhancing Cryptography initiative. That work should be prioritized and elevated, and its outputs should set the federal benchmark. Liability should attach not to content, but to the absence of proof.

HTTPS gave us read. Section 230 gave us write. ZK gives us prove.

Read Write Own Prove.

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.

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