New open standard extends the internet’s existing DNS infrastructure to enable portable identity, verification, and discovery for the emerging agentic web

Summary

• The Linux Foundation announced its intent to launch the Agent Name Service (ANS), a new open source standard that builds on existing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure to provide trusted identity, verification, and discovery for AI agents operating across the internet.
• As agents transition into enterprise production, ANS solves critical hurdles regarding authentication, trust, governance, and interoperability by establishing a secure, federated identity layer at internet scale without relying on centralized or proprietary registries.
• The framework allows systems operators and users to verify who an agent represents, what permissions it has, and whether its code and operational history remain authentic and unchanged.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 23, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the intent to launch the Agent Name Service (ANS), a new open standard designed to provide trusted identity, verification, and discovery for AI agents operating across the internet. ANS is built on the existing Domain Name System (DNS) and establishes a federated framework for securely identifying autonomous agents at internet scale without relying on proprietary registries or centralized control.

As AI agents rapidly move from experimentation into production systems, organizations face growing challenges around authentication, trust, governance, and interoperability. According to World Economic Forum data, 82% of executives plan to adopt AI agents within the next one to three years, despite widespread uncertainty around how to securely evaluate and manage autonomous systems. ANS addresses this gap by extending the same infrastructure that already powers the web today, creating a verifiable identity layer for the agentic era.

“AI agents will increasingly operate across enterprises, platforms, and digital services, which makes trusted identity infrastructure a foundational requirement,” said Jim Zemlin, CEO of Linux Foundation. “By building on DNS and open standards, ANS creates a scalable and interoperable framework for verified agent communication across the global digital economy.”

Rather than introducing a new lookup network or proprietary ecosystem, ANS anchors agent identity directly to DNS, the globally distributed infrastructure that already processes more than 100 million queries per second worldwide. The framework allows systems and users to verify who an agent represents, what permissions it has, and whether its code and operational history remain authentic and unchanged.

"The success of the internet didn't come from proprietary systems – it came from open standards, shared infrastructure, and an ecosystem committed to working together,” said Jared Sine, Chief Strategy and Legal Officer of GoDaddy. “We're grateful to the many organizations and contributors who helped advance Agent Name Service and bring that same collaborative approach to the age of AI agents. By building on proven internet foundations, ANS creates a path for agents to be identified and discovered across the open web, helping ensure the next era of innovation remains as open and interoperable as the last."

The ANS framework also supports decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs), enabling organizations to integrate existing identity systems into a unified verification model.

The project is seeking participation from enterprises, AI developers, infrastructure providers, and security researchers interested in helping establish open standards for the emerging agentic ecosystem. More information, including technical repositories and contribution opportunities, will be available through the Agent Name Service GitHub organization at https://github.com/agentnameservice.

Supporting Quotes

“The global success of the Internet is rooted in shared, open principles, and its next phase driven by autonomous AI agents must be as well. For decades, DNS has been the foundational bedrock of how we navigate and trust the web. By extending this existing, proven infrastructure to AI agents, the Agent Name Service offers one way to address the security and identity challenge before it gets out of hand. Cloudflare is fully committed to supporting this open standard to ensure the agentic web is fast, secure, and built on a shared foundation of trust.”

– Dane Knecht, Chief Technology Officer, Cloudflare

“As the lead author of the award-winning Agent Name Service research paper, my greatest concern was that agentic AI systems would proliferate without a neutral, trustworthy identity and discovery layer — creating exactly the shadow AI risks that keep security teams up at night. The Linux Foundation's governance model is precisely what ANS needs: vendor-neutral stewardship, open standards, and a collaborative community that ensures no single actor can compromise the integrity of agent discovery at internet scale.”

– Ken Huang, CEO, DistributedApps.ai

"AI agents are quickly becoming active participants in digital business, which means they need identity infrastructure that is open, portable, and built for the internet itself. ANS is important because it starts from DNS, one of the most proven trust layers we already have, and extends it into a world where agents need to be discovered, verified, and understood across many systems. At HOL, we believe the next phase of the internet will depend on shared standards that let agents move across protocols and ecosystems without creating new silos. ANS is a meaningful step toward that future."

– Michael Kantor, President, Hashgraph Online

“The internet's most enduring standards have always been built on open infrastructure that already belongs to everyone. Nothing exemplifies that better than DNS, the naming system that has underpinned trust on the internet for forty years. The Agent Name Service extends DNS into the age of AI, letting any organization identify its agents through the domain names it already owns, with no proprietary namespace and no gatekeeper. ANS also turns DNS into a trust signal for agents, anchored in the same proven mechanisms that already secure the web. That is the most efficient and responsible path forward: one shared specification, built on DNS, open to every organization and beholden to none.”

– Wei Chen, Chief Legal Office & Executive Vice President of Regulatory Strategy, Infoblox

“Identity is imperative to enable AI agents to operate across the open web. ANS defines a common standard for identity and verification, so developers can move faster with trust, interoperability, and security built in from the start.”

– Srini Tallapragada, President and Chief Engineering & Customer Success Officer, Salesforce, Inc.

"Every platform shift creates a choice between walled gardens and open ecosystems, and agentic AI is no exception. Enterprises want to adopt these systems, but they cannot take on unbounded risk or build a new integration for every vendor. That is why Cisco is contributing to open standards efforts at the IETF and the Linux Foundation, alongside partners across the industry, because the value of this technology will only compound when the ecosystem is open, decentralized and secure."

– Nathan Jokel, Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Cisco

"When designing the Agent Name Service, the goal was clear: we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, we needed to extend the foundational trust of the internet to a new generation of autonomous technology. By anchoring AI agent identity directly into the globally proven DNS infrastructure, ANS provides a scalable, decentralized, and backward-compatible framework that solves the critical challenges of verification and discovery. Bringing this standard to the Linux Foundation ensures it remains open, neutral, and ready to support the global agentic web.”

– Vineeth Sai Narajala, Co-author ANS, OWASP

###

Media Contact

The Linux Foundation
pr@linuxfoundation.org