Every Technology Wave Builds A Trust Layer. AI Is Building Its Now.
Every Technology Wave Builds A Trust Layer. AI Is Building Its Now.
Publish Date: 2026-05-31 01:21:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
concept of auditing and evaluating quality
getty
‘Lloyd’s of London is over 300 years old. It was built to insure ships in oceans no one trusted. The Lloyd’s of AI hasn’t been built yet, but it’s coming.
Trust institutions rarely show up first. They arrive late, after the technology has already broken something.
For example, the Big Four accounting firms were all founded around 1850. That timing is not an accident: the industrial revolution had produced firms too large and too complex for owners to verify directly, and a new profession emerged to do the verifying. Independent auditors became the trust layer that made modern capital markets possible.
Underwriters Laboratories emerged because electrification was powerful, useful, and occasionally catastrophic. The certificate authorities that quietly run SSL only existed because e-commerce demanded a way to know the site asking for your credit card was real. And of course, Lloyd’s of London began as a coffeehouse where shipowners tried to price risks they could not see.
AI is presently in this gap. Yes, the technology is being adopted. But it is creating a new surface area of risk. To remedy it, a new verification layer is emerging, and I think it’s the most important venture category nobody is talking about yet.
The early wave verified what AI said
An early wave of AI verification focused on confirming models were safe, accurate and claims were real. This ran from late 2022 through roughly the end of 2024, and solved a discrete problem for models at the time.
That gave (some amount of) hallucination detection, prompt injection defense and deepfake detection.
Implicit in the first wave was that a human, or a deterministic system, would read output and act on it. The verification layer just needs to flag the bad ones.
Agents are changing everything.
The next wave verifies what AI does
In 2025, AI stopped producing text for humans to read and started doing work for itself. Trades were booked. Refunds were…
