Agent Name Service: DNS-based identity for AI agents
The Linux Foundation's Agent Name Service gives AI agents DNS-anchored names, certificates and a public log. Cloudflare, GoDaddy and Salesforce back it.
How does a customer's AI agent know it is talking to your agent and not a fake? The Linux Foundation's answer is Agent Name Service (ANS), now a Linux Foundation project as of November 10. It ties an AI agent's identity to a domain you already own, the same way your website's TLS certificate does.
What actually happened
The Linux Foundation announced ANS at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. It is an open standard for agent identity, verification and discovery, built on existing DNS.
How it works, per the project's GitHub organization:
- Names under your domain. An agent gets a versioned name such as
ans://v1.0.0.my-agent.example.com. - Proof you own the domain. A registry authority checks domain ownership through DNS and ACME, then issues an identity certificate. Agents use it for mutual TLS when they call each other.
- A public log. Registrations go into an append-only transparency log, modeled on Certificate Transparency. Anyone can audit an agent's history, and an offline tool,
ans-verify, checks a record without calling a live service. - Open code. The reference implementation is Apache-2.0. The Go, Rust and Java SDKs are MIT.
The release lists 11 organizations that contributed to or adopted ANS, including Cisco, Cloudflare, DigiCert, GoDaddy, Infoblox, Salesforce and OWASP.
Why it matters for your business
Agents now book, buy and answer support tickets for people. Soon your booking agent will take requests from other companies' agents. Without identity, "I'm the customer's assistant" is just a claim, and anyone can make it.
ANS is early. It is a spec and reference code, not a switch you flip in Shopify. But the direction is clear: agent identity will hang off your domain. Three things to do now:
- Own your domain properly. Lock it, use a registrar with 2FA, and know who has DNS access. It will hold more than your website.
- Give each agent a name and an owner. Know what every agent you run does and who can change it.
- Ask your agent vendors about identity. Can their agent prove who it is? Can yours check who is calling?
Key takeaways
- Agent Name Service became a Linux Foundation project on November 10, 2026
- Agent names anchor to your domain; certificates are issued after DNS and ACME checks
- An append-only transparency log lets anyone audit an agent's registration history
- Code is open source: Apache-2.0 reference implementation, MIT SDKs
- Backers include Cisco, Cloudflare, DigiCert, GoDaddy, Infoblox and Salesforce
Running agents that talk to customers or other systems? We build AI agents on standards you own, tied to your domain, with logs of what they did and who approved it. See what we build or tell us what your agents do.
Sources: Linux Foundation press release, Agent Name Service on GitHub.
- #ai agents
- #agent identity
- #linux foundation
- #dns
- #open standards
Tommy Rush — Founder, Rush Commerce
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