Securing The Internet’s Humanity

InnovationSecuring The Internet’s HumanityByAri Abelson,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 21, 2026, 10:15am EDTAri Abelson is Co-Founder of OpenOrigins, building provenance infrastructure for AI, media and the internet. getty​The internet is being reshaped at a lightning pace. Already, 51% of internet traffic is bots, AI agent traffic is growing 8 times faster than human traffic, and there is an estimated $40 billion of GenAI fraud losses hitting the U.S. by the end of 2027. In other words, the internet is much less human and much more dangerous to navigate than ever before. But the biggest problem is one hidden just underneath the surface: No one knows how to tell human traffic and AI traffic apart. We are all living on the same websites, all clicking the same buttons and all sharing content on the same feeds. ​We have lost the ability to tell humans from AI, and the consequences will be dire if we don’t solve this problem soon.Let’s Try To Imagine The FutureIn a world of humans, the internet’s intelligent user base was capped proportionally to the population of people online. With AI, the number of agents performing “human-like” actions is essentially infinite, dependent only on global compute.It isn’t unreasonable to imagine trillions of agents navigating the internet in the coming decade. They will be collating information on the stock markets and deploying capital autonomously, picking out patterns, fabrics and factories for companies to use and planning, finding and booking our travel. The potential online actions are limitless. On one hand, this future allows humans more time to do the things we love (which, for a few of us, is the administrative task of being alive). On the other hand, it’s an unbelievable security risk where agents socially engineer and coerce human beings through agent-to-agen...