AI Agents Could Get Verified Identities, Courtesy of DNS
The Linux Foundation has announced intent to launch the Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard that extends DNS to give AI agents verifiable identities. Each registered agent gets a DNS-style versioned name backed by an identity certificate issued after standard DNS and ACME checks. All registrations, renewals, and revocations are recorded in a tamper-evident append-only Merkle log, and an offline tool called ans-verify can audit records without a live registry connection. GoDaddy originally built ANS on an existing IETF draft, reusing its existing certificate infrastructure handling over 100 million active TLS certificates. The reference implementation is MIT-licensed Go code hosted on GitHub and reportedly spins up in about 60 seconds.