AI agent discovery is advancing as Infoblox and GoDaddy Inc. announce support for complementary open standards designed to help AI agents identify, discover, and verify each other across the open web.

Infoblox is advancing DNS for AI Discovery (DNS-AID), an open and interoperable approach built on existing Domain Name System infrastructure. At the same time, GoDaddy is helping develop the Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard focused on AI agent identity, naming, and verification using DNS and public key infrastructure. Both initiatives are being developed within community standards bodies with the goal of enabling independent implementations and avoiding single vendor control.

DNS-AID is advancing as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft and open-source framework. It defines how AI agents can publish discoverable metadata using existing DNS record types. These include RFC 9460 Service Bindings (SVCB), DNS-SD service discovery, DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE). The framework is not owned by any company and is designed as a community standard.

In parallel, the Agent Name Service (ANS) focuses on AI agent identity, naming, and verification. It is built on DNS and PKI and allows agent operators to use domain names they already own. This approach avoids the need for a new registry or proprietary naming system. In the context of AI agent discovery, ANS and DNS-AID together aim to support both identity verification and discoverability across distributed systems.

ANS is designed to ensure agents are uniquely named and cryptographically verifiable. GoDaddy is a co-author of the ANS IETF draft and contributes to its open-source implementation. The system is intended to make agents identifiable through existing internet infrastructure that already supports domains, websites, and email services.

The shared principle behind both efforts is that no single entity should control how AI agents are named or verified. Instead, trust should be based on open and auditable cryptographic signals. ANS focuses on identity, while DNS-AID focuses on discovery of capabilities and endpoints. Together, they form complementary layers within a broader open framework for AI systems.

Jared Sine, chief strategy and legal officer at GoDaddy, said agents can only reach their full potential if users can verify who they are interacting with. Wei Chen, CLO and EVP Regulatory Strategy at Infoblox, said DNS remains a proven global infrastructure model that replaced centralized systems with an open and federated protocol.

The companies also emphasized why DNS is central to this direction. It is globally deployed, resilient, and supported by mature security practices. It already powers critical internet services at scale. By building on DNS, AI systems can inherit established governance, caching, and security mechanisms.

Finally, both organizations called on cloud providers, registrars, security companies, and standards bodies to participate in building open frameworks for agent identity and discovery. They stressed that collaboration is essential for shaping a distributed and verifiable ecosystem for AI systems.

AI agent discovery is positioned as a foundational capability for the next phase of internet infrastructure, with DNS-based standards expected to play a central role in enabling trust, interoperability, and verification across agents.

Related post

View all