Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Launch Agent Name Service to Establish Trusted Identity Infrastructure for AI Agents

🔥 Prime Day Savings Are Live! Up to 75% Savings • Ends June 26 • SAVE NOW

English<br>Japan<br>China<br>Europe

Sign In

Search

5 MIN READ

Linux Foundation Announces Intent to Launch Agent Name Service to Establish Trusted Identity Infrastructure for AI Agents

The Linux Foundation | 23 June 2026

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on LinkedIn

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...