Something remarkable is happening in technology right now. AI systems are getting better at helping us create, communicate, and collaborate. Document workflows that once took hours can now be completed in minutes. Research that required weeks of library work can be synthesized almost instantly. The pace of progress is genuinely exciting.
At the same time, these powerful tools have created new challenges for how we establish trust online. When AI can generate convincing text, images, audio, and video, the traditional signals we've relied on to verify identity and authenticity become less reliable. This isn't a reason to fear AI; it's an invitation to build better infrastructure for trust.
Open standards offer a compelling path forward. By creating shared, transparent systems for verification, we can build trust that's portable, vendor-neutral, and resilient. Let's explore why this matters and how it works.
The changing landscape of digital trust
For most of the internet's history, trust has been contextual. We trust an email because it comes from a known address. We trust a document because it's attached to a message from a colleague. We trust a video call because we recognize the person on screen. These signals worked reasonably well in a world where creating convincing fakes was difficult and expensive.
That world is changing rapidly. Identity fraud cost consumers over $27 billion in 2024, with businesses reporting average annual losses of $7 million. Financial institutions have seen deepfake fraud attempts increase by over 2,000% in just three years. These numbers reflect a fundamental shift: the tools for deception have become dramatically more accessible.
Real-world incidents illustrate the sophistication of modern fraud. In one notable case, a finance worker attended what appeared to be a routine video conference with their company's CFO and senior executives. Every other participant turned out to be an AI-generated deepfake. The realistic meeting convinced the worker to authorize significant fund transfers to fraudulent accounts.
These stories aren't meant to frighten; they're meant to clarify. The old approach of "trust but verify" assumed that verification was straightforward. When verification itself becomes uncertain, we need new foundations. For a deeper dive into the technical solutions, see our article on why trust services matter in the age of AI.
Why context-dependent trust isn't enough
Consider how most digital agreements work today. Someone signs a contract through an e-signature platform. The platform records that a particular email address clicked "sign" at a particular time. This record lives in the platform's database, and the signed document typically includes an attestation page referencing that record.
This system depends heavily on context. If you received the document directly from the platform, you have some confidence in its authenticity. But what happens when that document is exported, emailed, stored in a different system, or retrieved years later? The verification context often doesn't travel with the document. You're left trusting that the file hasn't been modified and that the attestation page wasn't fabricated.
The same pattern applies to credentials and identity claims more broadly. A credential might be verified at the moment it's issued, but that verification becomes harder to confirm as the credential moves between systems. Each handoff introduces uncertainty. Each storage system becomes a potential point of tampering.
This creates operational friction that undermines the efficiency of digital workflows. Legal teams spend time verifying document authenticity. Compliance officers manually check credentials. Organizations sometimes retreat to paper-based processes that feel more trustworthy, even when they're actually less secure. The promise of frictionless digital business gives way to verification anxiety.
Portable trust through cryptographic verification
There's a better approach: trust that travels with the artifact. Instead of relying on the context in which you received a document or credential, the verification is embedded in the thing itself. Anyone can verify it, at any time, without depending on any particular platform or vendor.
This is the core insight behind verified credentials and cryptographic signing. When someone signs a document using a verified digital identity, the signature creates a cryptographic bond between the signer, the document content, and the moment in time. Any modification to the document breaks this bond in a detectable way. The verification is portable; it works regardless of how the document reached you.
Think of the difference between a photocopy of an ID card and a cryptographically signed digital credential. The photocopy requires you to trust the context: who sent it, how it was transmitted, whether it's been altered. The cryptographic credential can be independently verified by any system that understands the standard. The trust is in the math, not the messenger.
This approach extends naturally to documents and agreements. A contract signed with verified digital credentials carries proof of who signed it and when. That proof travels with the document wherever it goes: through email, into archives, across systems, even decades into the future. The verification doesn't depend on any single vendor's continued existence or cooperation.
Why open standards matter for trust
Cryptographic verification is powerful, but it only creates broad value when built on open standards. If every platform implements its own proprietary verification scheme, we end up with fragmented trust: credentials that work in one system but not another, documents that can only be verified through specific vendors.
Open standards ensure interoperability. A credential issued by one compliant system can be verified by any other compliant system. A signed document can be validated using open-source tools, without licensing fees or vendor relationships. The infrastructure for trust becomes a public good rather than a competitive advantage for any particular company.
This matters for longevity too. When verification standards are open and well-documented, the ecosystem can evolve. New tools can be built. Libraries can be maintained in multiple programming languages. Your ability to verify a document doesn't depend on whether the original signing platform still exists or still supports your use case.
At the Open Document Alliance, we believe verification should be a first-class citizen in document standards, not an afterthought bolted on by individual platforms. The formats we create and support should carry verification data natively, enabling any compliant tool to establish authenticity. This is a core part of what we mean when we talk about documents that work everywhere.
How this connects to document formats
Trust and document formats are more intertwined than they might initially seem. A document format that doesn't support cryptographic signatures and verifiable credentials is missing essential infrastructure for the modern era. It's like building a filing cabinet without a lock: functional, but incomplete. This is why open document standards need to be designed with verification in mind from the start.
When we work on open standards for agreements, we're thinking about verification from the start. How do you prove who signed? How do you detect tampering? How do you establish when a document was created or modified? These questions have technical answers that should be built into the format specification, not left to individual implementations.
The same applies to document provenance more broadly. As AI becomes capable of generating increasingly sophisticated content, knowing where a document came from, and being able to prove it, becomes valuable. Open standards can encode provenance in ways that any tool can read and verify, creating transparency that proprietary systems can't match.
This connects to our broader mission. We believe documents should be portable, interoperable, and future-proof. Adding robust verification to that list strengthens all the other properties. A portable document that carries verified provenance is more valuable than one without. An interoperable format that supports cryptographic signatures enables trust to flow alongside content.
Practical applications today
Verified credentials are already transforming workflows across industries. In education, digital diplomas and transcripts can be instantly verified by employers without contacting the issuing institution. In healthcare, professional credentials travel with practitioners and can be validated in real time. In supply chains, certificates of origin and compliance attestations carry cryptographic proof of their authenticity.
For agreements specifically, verified signing changes the trust model entirely. Instead of relying solely on a platform's attestation, the document itself carries proof that a verified individual approved it at a specific moment. This creates audit trails that are tamper-evident and independently verifiable, valuable for legal proceedings, compliance requirements, and peace of mind.
Privacy-preserving verification is also advancing. Good credential systems support selective disclosure, proving you're over 21 without revealing your birthdate, or proving employment at a company without exposing your salary. Open standards can encode these patterns, ensuring that verification doesn't require surrendering more information than necessary.
What developers and organizations can do
If you're building software that handles documents or identity, consider how verification fits into your architecture. Are you encoding trust in ways that are portable and verifiable? Are you using open standards that will be maintainable long-term? Are you giving users control over their verification data?
If you're evaluating tools for your organization, ask about verification capabilities. Can documents be signed with cryptographic methods? Can credentials be verified independently? What happens to verification data when you export or migrate? These questions help distinguish robust systems from those that depend on fragile contextual trust.
If you care about open standards more broadly, consider getting involved in the communities developing verification infrastructure. The work isn't glamorous (writing specifications, building test suites, maintaining reference implementations), but it creates the foundation that everyone else builds on. As we discuss in why tech ecosystems matter, this kind of shared infrastructure creates compounding value for everyone.
The opportunity in front of us
The current moment presents a choice. We can respond to the erosion of contextual trust by retreating, adding friction, requiring more manual verification, slowing down digital workflows. Or we can respond by building better infrastructure: portable trust that travels with documents and credentials, verification that works across systems and over time.
Open standards make the second path possible. They ensure that trust infrastructure isn't controlled by any single vendor, that verification remains accessible to everyone, and that the systems we build today will still work decades from now. This is the same logic that drives our work on document formats: openness creates durability, interoperability, and user control. We explore this in depth in why open standards matter in the age of AI.
AI is going to keep getting more capable. The tools for creating convincing content, and convincing fakes, will continue to improve. The right response isn't to fear this progress, but to ensure our trust infrastructure keeps pace. When verification is robust and portable, the creative potential of AI becomes an unambiguous benefit rather than a source of anxiety.
We're optimistic about what's possible. The technical foundations for portable trust already exist. The standards are maturing. The developer tooling is improving. What's needed now is adoption: organizations choosing to build on open verification standards, developers integrating these capabilities into their applications, users expecting and demanding trust that travels with their documents.
At the Open Document Alliance, we're committed to making verification a core part of how documents work. Not as a premium feature controlled by any single vendor, but as open infrastructure that benefits everyone. Documents that prove their provenance. Signatures that verify independently. Credentials that travel with the people and organizations they describe.
The future of digital trust is being built right now. Let's make sure it's built on open foundations.