Persona introduces Persona AI, advancing its vision for the Next era of identity. The new suite helps identity teams scale and automate their programs using agents powered by their existing data and policies, while keeping sensitive information and consequential decisions under their control. Oct 30, 2026 Prev Next 1 of 43,855 Persona, the leading global identity platform, announced Persona AI, a suite of AI products that brings agentic capabilities to identity operations. The launch builds on Persona's vision for the future of identity: helping organizations scale how trust is established online while retaining oversight over how consequential decisions are made. The suite includes Persona Assistant, Persona Agents and Persona Extend. Designed and tested with more than 30 early-access customers, including Zillow and Etsy, Persona AI currently powers hundreds of thousands of identity decisions in production. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, which leave teams to build the identity context, integrations, and personally identifiable information (PII) controls themselves, Persona AI works within the platform where those foundations already exist, while keeping every action transparent, permissioned and auditable. AI is changing both the threats identity teams face and the tools they can use to respond. On the Persona platform alone, deepfakes have increased more than 50x in recent years, and attacks are growing faster than teams can staff against them. To respond effectively, teams need AI tailored to their fraud patterns, use cases, policies and compliance obligations. The Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has acknowledged AI's potential role in compliance and proposed anti-money-laundering reforms encouraging financial institutions to consider how AI and other technologies could strengthen their compliance programs. "AI can't fight AI-powered attacks on its own," said Rick Song, CEO and co-founder of Persona. "The strongest defense pairs AI with the judgment of identity experts, working inside the systems where their data, policies and case history already live. That's the approach behind Persona AI, and it's the start of a more agentic Persona, where agents act as primary operators and take on more of the work, while people stay firmly in charge of the decisions that matter." Persona AI is built for any identity use case at any company, and no existing AI setup is required. Several customers already use it across various workflows: marketplace fraud teams review flagged accounts, fintech compliance teams run KYC and KYB reviews, and product teams at AI companies get answers from their identity data without filing a data request. Key benefits include: * Faster decisions on every case. Case Review Agents gather the evidence for any sort of review, check it against a business's own policies and recommend a decision with their reasoning visible to reviewers. Cases that meet a team's criteria can be approved automatically and exceptions go to a person, so reviewers spend their time on the cases with real risk. * Answers without a data request. Persona Assistant lets teams ask questions about their identity data in plain language, such as why verification rates are trending upwards, and complete tasks from the dashboard, with approval at the steps that need it. * Policy to production, faster. Policy Agents turn compliance and risk requirements into a full workflow and flag gaps or conflicts with existing rules before they reach production. * Building identity workflows with the AI you already use. Persona Extend lets teams use their preferred AI tools to build and configure identity operations in Persona. MCP and CLI connectors provide permissioned access and a traceable record of every action. Parafin, which powers embedded financing for platforms such as DoorDash, needed to scale its review operations as financing applications grew. Persona's Case Review Agents took over Parafin's routine reviews, applying Parafin's own approval criteria, so the risk operations team could focus on fraud investigations and fund merchants faster. The agents helped cut median KYC review time for capital products by about 95%, from roughly 18 hours to under one hour. The decisions matched Parafin's human reviewers' judgment 99% of the time, and it approved 100% of eligible cases on its own, routing only exceptions to the review team. "By using Persona for both identity verification and case review, we didn't have to worry about data leaving the walled garden that is Persona," said Aimal Mehrabi, head of operations at Parafin. "That made it much easier to demonstrate how we controlled our data and get approval from our bank partners."

Persona offers $100K grants for academic research on identity, fraud and privacy. Open funding program supports university research into privacy, fraud intelligence and accessible identity San Francisco-based identity verification company Persona has launched an open research grant program offering up to $100,000 per award for university projects focused on data privacy, fraud intelligence and accessible identity. What the grant covers. The grants support projects lasting up to 12 months. Full-time faculty and researchers at universities and degree-granting research institutions are eligible. There is no cap on the number of awards, and applications are accepted on a rolling basis. More than funding. Grant recipients work alongside Persona's team, which builds identity systems used in production, and the company says it will support publication of the results so the broader field can build on them. Academics often lack access to real-world fraud patterns and operational systems, so that collaboration may matter as much as the money. Charles Yeh, Persona's co-founder and CTO, said the industry is investing heavily in making AI more capable but far less in "proving there's a real person behind the screen." He added that keeping the internet human "is too important for any one company to take on alone." How Relay works. Yeh credits Persona's research with helping power Relay, a product that lets people prove they are human without revealing who they are. Relay is built on Privacy Pass, an open IETF standard also used by Cloudflare and Apple. It confirms a single claim, such as whether a user is over 18 or is a real human, and returns only a pass or fail result to the requesting platform. Persona says Relay uses Privacy Pass to separate identity verification from the presentation of a proof, allowing platforms to check a claim without receiving the user's underlying identity information. Persona says it deletes the underlying verification data once the result is produced. The company says the strongest demand for Relay has come from age assurance. Why the research matters now. Americans reported losing a record $15.9 billion to fraud in 2025, according to the Federal Trade Commission. That is up 27 percent in a single year and nearly five times the 2020 figure. The FBI's Internet Crime Report puts cybercrime losses at $20.9 billion. Generative AI lets bad actors clone faces and voices and impersonate people and brands at scale. Thales' 2026 Bad Bot Report estimates that automated traffic now accounts for 53 percent of all internet activity. Building on university partnerships. With the University at Buffalo, Persona built a taxonomy and benchmark for selfie fraud, which Biometric Update covered in September. Its work with the University of Connecticut on privacy-preserving cryptography produced two papers, "Oblivious Single Access Machines Are Concretely Efficient" and "Updatable Oblivious Key Value Stores With Access Control and Application to Multi Key Searchable Encryption." Persona is currently working with the University of North Carolina on detecting fraud in selfie videos. What the CVPR paper found. Two Persona papers were accepted to CVPR 2026, and one co-authored by Yeh made the main conference. The research examined whether general-purpose image models, including CLIP, DINOv2/v3 and SSCD, retain information that could identify individuals, even though they are not designed for facial recognition. CLIP leaked the most identity information of the models tested. The team's proposed fix, a one-shot linear projection that strips out identity information, cut leakage to near-chance while keeping the models useful for other tasks. A familiar model in a new area. Partnerships between universities and outside funders have a long history in biometrics, though the money has usually come from the government. In 2023, IARPA awarded Michigan State University a four-year, $12 million grant under its BRIAR program. MSU researchers, including Xiaoming Liu, Anil Jain and Arun Ross, used it to build FarSight, which combines face, body shape and gait to identify people from drone footage. The collaboration drew criticism from Congress over its surveillance implications. At the University of Rochester, Voice Biometrics Group began by sponsoring Professor Zhiyao Duan's doctoral students. That arrangement grew, with support from a state-backed grant, into IngenID, a spinout built to commercialize Duan's voice biometrics research. Persona's program differs from both. It is an open, rolling call from a single vendor, and it focuses on privacy and fraud rather than recognition capability. Research independence and IP rights. Persona says it supports the publishing and sharing of research results, and notes that terms for publication and intellectual property from funded research is to be negotiated at the start of any project. The program does not state whether researchers can publish findings that are unfavorable to Persona's products, or how access to its fraud data will be governed. Those details will help determine how independently the funded research can be conducted and published. Article topics. Latest biometrics news. Oct 23, 2026, 3:53 pm EDT A question period for companies interested in delivering Bermuda's national digital identity system closes today, as the island nation explores... Oct 23, 2026, 2:17 pm EDT It might be a mantra for the contemporary identity sector: "The idea is continuous checks." So says Spokeo COO Harrison... Oct 23, 2026, 1:55 pm EDT The UK Home Office has published its data protection impact assessment (DPIA) for live facial recognition technology, including software, hardware... Oct 23, 2026, 1:37 pm EDT Data breaches are mounting as AI enables new identity fraud techniques. In South Korea, a "Connecting Information" (CI) identifier functions... Oct 23, 2026, 12:48 pm EDT Mobile driver's licenses are coming to Europe in 2028, according to the EU's plan for European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallets... Oct 23, 2026, 11:30 am EDT Enterprises deploying AI agents are struggling to maintain trust and oversight of them, even in some high-risk scenarios. To help...