AIBRIEF
The country's national biometric ID, used for banking and welfare, is releasing a face authentication toolkit as its chief predicts AI 'agents' will soon handle identity checks on users' behalf.
Aadhaar, India's national biometric ID used for banking, welfare, and telecom, is opening its face-authentication layer to third-party app developers through a new software development kit (SDK), UIDAI Chairperson Neelkanth Mishra said at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai on Wednesday.
Daily authentications have climbed to "10 crore a day", roughly 100 million, up from 7 crore when Mishra first wrote the agency's annual report. UIDAI is "preparing to be at 25 to 30 crore" (250-300 million) per day, Business Standard reported, with The Hindu Business Line adding context on the higher target.
The shift has an engineering precondition already in production: the Aadhaar app, nearing 6 crore (60 million) downloads, supports selective disclosure, letting a user prove they are "over 18" or share only an address and photo for a hotel check-in without exposing the full ID record. That is the technical floor under Mishra's claim that "instead of humans trying to authenticate, they may delegate it to agents" within roughly three years, with use cases "hard to imagine right now."
Co-panelist Jitendra Gupta of Jupiter pushed the same idea from the operator side: a permissioned agent that "can use only age related authentic credentials" for a hotel check-in, treating the agentic ecosystem "as an API."
UIDAI is also deploying post-quantum cryptography and building "hyperscaler-like" in-house capacity, while facing roughly 100 cyberattacks a day, Economic Times and ANI News reported.