OpenAI has joined the FIDO Alliance Board of Directors, with the company citing the need to evolve authentication frameworks for AI agents that act autonomously on behalf of users. The move brings one of the world’s most prominent AI companies into the primary open standards body responsible for FIDO2, WebAuthn, and passkeys.
OpenAI stated its rationale directly: “The FIDO Alliance has led the way in making authentication more secure, private, and interoperable across the web. We’ve joined FIDO to participate in emerging work to evolve authentication for agentic intelligence. 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.”
Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and CEO of the FIDO Alliance, framed the announcement around two parallel developments already underway at FIDO: the global rollout of passkeys as phishing-resistant replacements for passwords, and the growing momentum of digital credentials as a privacy-preserving method for presenting verified information. “The common thread is clear,” Shikiar said, “making it simple and trustworthy for people to present verified credentials, whether directly or through agents acting on their behalf.”
Shikiar described the challenge of agent authentication as requiring coordination across identity, AI, payments, and policy domains, and positioned FIDO’s role as ensuring the resulting standards keep users at the center. “This means preserving user intent, maintaining strong security guarantees, and enabling interoperability across ecosystems,” he said.
OpenAI’s arrival comes as FIDO Alliance’s push into digital credentials has accelerated, with the organization launching a dedicated working group in December 2025 to align fragmented wallet and verifiable credential ecosystems. OpenAI follows SK Telecom’s recent FIDO board appointment in February 2026, which also emphasized the expanding scope of FIDO governance as passkeys adoption grows globally.
The governance move arrives alongside parallel industry efforts to address the same problem from the technology side. 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 authentication standards would need to support.
OpenAI’s FIDO membership is a distinct initiative from its co-founding of the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation alongside Anthropic and Block, which addresses broader agentic infrastructure. The FIDO board membership focuses specifically on authentication and credential standards. No formal press release from the FIDO Alliance had been issued as of April 13; the announcement was made via LinkedIn posts from OpenAI and Shikiar.
Sources: OpenAI LinkedIn, Andrew Shikiar LinkedIn, FIDO Alliance Leadership
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By Ji-seo Kim
