Building ZK-Powered AI Guardrails with Wyatt Benno

In this episode, Anna and Nico chat with Wyatt Benno, technical founder of ICME Labs. They trace Wyatt’s start into ZK in the ZKHack Discord and Justin Thaler’s study group before diving into ICME’s early work on folding schemes, local proving, and NovaNet. The conversation then shifts to ICME’s work at the intersection of AI and ZK. Wyatt introduces ICMEPreflight, a ZK-based guardrail tool for AI. They then explore how succinct verification and privacy-preserving proofs can help secure agentic commerce and provide stronger guarantees than existing guardrail approaches. They also discuss Jolt Atlas, ICME’s zero-knowledge machine learning framework, the connections between ZK and AI and the challenges of scaling ZKML. Finally, Wyatt encourages future advances in ZKML that could unlock privacy and verifiability in AI systems.   Related Links

• ICME Labs
• Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes (2022)
• Jolt Atlas: Verifiable Inference via Lookup Arguments in Zero Knowledge (2026)
• ZK Podcast:Is ZK dead? Or has it just begun? with the ZK Pod co-hosts
• ZK Podcast:Isogenies with Luca De Feo
• ZK Podcast:How ZK inspired AI Watermarking with Miranda Christ
• Neo: Lattice-based folding scheme for CCS over small fields and pay-per-bit commitments (2025)
• Awesome Folding Schemes Repo by Lurk Labs
• Proofs, Arguments, and Zero-Knowledge by Justin Thaler

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