If you want to follow what's happening in AI, it helps to know where the conversations are happening. That doesn't just mean the headlines and white papers; it means the standards bodies, working groups, and protocol discussions shaping the infrastructure AI systems will have to live with (and live inside).

Disinformation. Misinformation. Malinformation. These terms get used interchangeably, but they’re not the same thing. That distinction matters when designing resilient infrastructure that supports trust. Most of our efforts to address these problems focus on content, activities like fact-checking, moderation, and takedown requests.

I went to Geneva to understand what, if anything, people were saying regarding digital identity and standards in a governance-focused forum. My brain is now full. I adore the topic of identity and the standards development process; everything from the brilliant minds, the challenges, and the intense edge cases.

Much like "the cloud" or "the superhighway", the metaphor of a "wallet" has become convenient shorthand for a tangle of technical, policy, and usability decisions. As we keep building out digital identity ecosystems with verifiable credentials, identity wallets, and cross-jurisdictional trust models, I ask: is the metaphor still helping us?

What do you think of when someone says "digital identity"? Biometrics? Login credentials? A string of JSON data? Your social media account? The answer probably depends on where you are, how old you are, and/or how tech-savvy you are.

There’s been renewed attention lately on mobile driver’s licenses (mDLs) and the ISO/IEC specification that defines them. One of the more surprising aspects of the specification is that it allows the entity verifying a credential to contact the issuer directly in real time, a capability known as "phone home."

Resilience is on my list of the top ten buzzwords of the year. Whether we’re looking at geopolitical turmoil, AI disruption, or yet another IdP outage, it’s clear that the infrastructure we’ve relied on for decades is straining under new (and not-so-new) pressures.

Once upon a time, digital systems were built around a beautifully simple idea: one user, one identity, one device, one intent. That model worked, for some value of "worked." Mostly, it was good enough to solve 80% of the use cases.

Since I wrote last week about MCP and the need for a more structured standards development process, this week I feel like diving into what it means to build an open standard. Unfortunately, "open standard" is a term that often gets thrown around and means entirely too many different things.

MCP is 'an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs.' If we’re moving toward a world where AIs are expected to do All The Things, interfacing with our applications and services, then having a universal adapter that lets AIs talk to everything is undeniably powerful.