New Delhi, June 24: The Linux Foundation has announced plans to launch the Agent Name Service (ANS), a new open standard aimed at creating a trusted identity, verification, and discovery framework for AI agents operating across the internet.
The proposed framework is designed to address a growing challenge in the AI ecosystem as autonomous agents move from experimentation into enterprise deployment. With organizations increasingly exploring AI agents for business operations, customer service, automation, and software tasks, concerns around authentication, trust, governance, and interoperability have become more urgent.
ANS is being positioned as an open-source standard that builds on the existing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure rather than relying on centralized registries or proprietary networks. By leveraging DNS, the framework seeks to provide a secure and scalable way to identify and verify AI agents at internet scale.
According to the Linux Foundation, the system would allow enterprises, users, and digital platforms to confirm key details about an AI agent — including who it represents, what permissions it has, and whether its code or operational history has remained authentic and untampered.
The foundation believes that trusted identity infrastructure will become a core requirement as AI agents begin operating across multiple enterprises, services, and digital environments. By tying agent identity to open internet standards, ANS aims to create a more interoperable and transparent ecosystem for machine-to-machine and agent-to-system interactions.
The framework is also expected to support decentralized identifiers (DIDs) and Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs), allowing businesses and institutions to integrate existing identity systems into a broader AI verification model.
Industry leaders backing the initiative argue that the future of AI agent infrastructure should be built on the same principles that helped shape the modern internet — open standards, shared infrastructure, and broad ecosystem collaboration.
The Linux Foundation has invited enterprises, AI developers, infrastructure providers, and security researchers to participate in the project and contribute to shaping the new standard. Technical resources and contribution opportunities are expected to be made available through the project’s GitHub repository.
As AI agents become more capable and widely deployed, initiatives like ANS could play a crucial role in building the trust, security, and governance systems needed to support the next generation of internet-scale autonomous services.
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