Zerker’s agent and media verification platform provides a foundational layer of trust that allows AI systems to safely act, transact, and decide.
Last year, Gartner predicted that 40% of enterprise apps would feature task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in mid-2025. But as enterprise applications rapidly integrate AI agents, a critical gap has emerged: These autonomous systems are executing decisions, handling transactions, and coordinating across organizations, yet they have no AI-native mechanism for verifiable accountability.
Zerker Labs, a new spinout from SRI, is building the foundational trust and verification infrastructure for this emerging agentic economy. AI systems that act, transact, and coordinate autonomously on behalf of people and organizations will bring enormous efficiency gains, but they need to be paired with a robust trust and verification layer.
“Zerker Labs is building the next frontier: the trust infrastructure that the age of AI demands. We’re proud to see SRI’s OLIVE platform being deployed in a powerful enterprise platform that helps deliver the productivity gains promised by AI while maintaining trust.” — Peter Marcotullio
Zerker Labs provides cryptographic, tamper-evident trust and verification that is independent of any central authority. Zerker’s technology ensures that all agentic activity can be proven, not merely logged.
“Agents are already negotiating, transacting, and delegating across systems at machine speed. The protocols exist. The trust layer doesn’t,” says Zerker Labs founder and CEO Revaz Tsivtsivadze. “Without this critical verification layer, organizations can’t safely extend meaningful autonomy to AI. The danger is that the potential of the agentic economy will stall at the boundary of accountability.”
Zerker Labs applies its trust and verification capabilities as agent-level primitives. The trust layer cryptographically records not only what an agent did, but what it saw, what models and prompts it used, and how it reached its conclusion.
Zerker Labs’ first product, Treeship, is currently available to builders as an open-source release. Treeship gives every AI agent action a cryptographic receipt that anyone holding the artifact can verify, without trusting a vendor or a centralized log.
The Zerker Labs platform draws on SRI’s OLIVE multimedia processing platform, which SRI has licensed to Zerker. OLIVE was developed in part through DARPA-funded research programs like SemaFor and MediaFor and hardened through production deployments to U.S. defense, intelligence, and law enforcement users as well as commercial customers. The platform contains multiple asset management and analysis plug-ins, such as audio transcription and translation, speaker detection with audio segmentation, synthetic media detection, and content characterization, which can be stitched together into custom multimedia processing and verification workflows invoked by people or AI agents.
As agentic AI workflows proliferate, enterprises in numerous industries will need to distinguish between human and AI-driven assets and actions, monitor the quality of agentic activity across complex workflows, and validate the soundness of automated decisions that have significant financial and regulatory impact. Financial services organizations, social media platforms, and news media companies, for example, will be able to build on Zerker Labs’ platform to establish verifiable accountability across AI-driven workflows, with the same rigor demanded by the national security applications that shaped SRI’s groundbreaking research into multimedia processing and verification.
“SRI has spent decades building the foundational technologies that define how the world communicates and computes,” says Peter Marcotullio, senior vice president of commercialization at SRI. “Zerker Labs is building the next frontier: the trust infrastructure that the age of AI demands. We’re proud to see SRI’s OLIVE platform being deployed in a powerful enterprise platform that helps deliver the productivity gains promised by AI while maintaining trust.”
To learn more about Zerker or SRI’s ventures team, contact us.
