OpenAI has joined the FIDO Alliance Board of Directors, bringing one of the world’s largest AI companies into the standards body that governs passkeys, the phone-based biometric authentication method replacing passwords across billions of devices.
The company’s stated focus is not passkeys themselves but what comes next: authentication frameworks for AI agents that act autonomously on behalf of mobile users. “We’ve joined FIDO to participate in emerging work to evolve authentication for agentic intelligence,” OpenAI said. “As AI agents begin to act on behalf of people, secure and private identity frameworks will be critical to ensuring agents can be trusted, verified, and governed by clear user intent.”
Passkeys work by using a phone’s built-in biometrics, a fingerprint scan or face unlock, to authenticate users to apps and websites without a password. That model assumes a human is present at the device. As AI agents begin to transact, book services, and access accounts on behalf of users, the authentication chain needs to extend from the phone’s biometric sensor through to the agent’s actions, maintaining proof of human intent along the way.
FIDO Alliance Executive Director and CEO Andrew Shikiar framed the challenge as a convergence of two trends the Alliance is already managing: passkeys for phishing-resistant login, and digital credentials for privacy-preserving identity presentation. “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 said. He described the evolution as requiring coordination across identity, AI, payments, and policy.
The timing connects to concrete industry moves. Mastercard and Google’s Verifiable Intent framework introduced a cryptographic approach to linking human intent to AI agent transactions, illustrating the type of trust infrastructure that mobile authentication standards will need to support. The FIDO Alliance itself launched a digital credentials working group in December 2025, broadening its scope beyond passkeys into the wallet and verifiable credential ecosystems that mobile identity increasingly depends on.
OpenAI follows SK Telecom’s FIDO board appointment in February 2026. The company has also separately co-founded the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation alongside Anthropic and Block, addressing broader agentic infrastructure beyond authentication.
Sources: OpenAI LinkedIn, Andrew Shikiar LinkedIn, FIDO Alliance Leadership
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By the Mobile ID World Editorial Team
