The Linux Foundation announced its intent to launch Agent Name Service, or ANS, an open standard that would give AI agents trusted identities using the Domain Name System, the same infrastructure that maps website names to network addresses.
With ANS, the foundation said, systems and users could verify who an agent represents, what permissions it has, and whether its code and operational history remain authentic and unchanged. Tying agent identity to DNS, which handles more than 100 million queries per second worldwide, is intended to create what the foundation called a federated identity layer at internet scale, without relying on centralized or proprietary registries.
The foundation framed the effort around a gap it says enterprises have created for themselves. Companies are putting agents into production before they have settled how to authenticate them, govern what they are allowed to do, or make them interoperate, the foundation said, citing World Economic Forum data that 82 percent of executives plan to adopt AI agents within one to three years. Companies including Cloudflare, GoDaddy, Cisco, Salesforce, and Infoblox issued statements supporting the effort.
The announcement adds an infrastructure layer to a problem that has so far been addressed mostly through commercial products. A wave of identity and security vendors has moved to treat agents as governed enterprise identities, the largest platforms have raced into the category and begun acquiring their way in, and a funded startup has emerged to build agent-identity infrastructure from scratch. ANS would sit underneath those products, at the standards level, alongside an existing agent-authentication standards effort involving FIDO, the OpenID Foundation, and others.
The shared premise across the commercial and standards work is consistent: before an agent acts across enterprise systems, it should be an identifiable actor with a verifiable name, defined permissions, and a record that can be checked. ANS proposes to anchor that identity in the naming system the internet already runs on.
Sources: Linux Foundation, SiliconANGLE, The New Stack
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team