AI agents now transact across global systems without any way to prove who they are. On November 10, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Salt Lake City, a project called Agent Name Service (ANS) formally launched under the Linux Foundation, according to an official press release, with the goal of fixing exactly that. ANS is an open standard for AI agent identity, and instead of inventing something from scratch, it is built on the DNS infrastructure the internet already runs on, providing trusted identity, verification and discovery for agents operating across systems.
That reuse is the whole point. Rather than building another proprietary system, the standard leans on the domain names and certificates the web has relied on for decades. The specification consists of seven documents, covering how agents are named and registered, how identities are published through DNS, and how they are verified. The rest of the documents deal with how unauthorized changes to identity records are monitored, and how agents verify one another.
Momentum has come fast. Since the intent to launch was announced in June, 11 organizations have contributed to or adopted the standard, including Cisco, Cloudflare, DigiCert, GoDaddy, Infoblox, Salesforce and OWASP. The list spans networking gear and certificate services, along with domain services and enterprise software. Early adoption is visible too. AGNTCY Agent Directory Service, another Linux Foundation project, now verifies ANS identities, and ANS Finder implements the Agentic Resource Discovery specification and has passed registry conformance tests.
The endorsements line up with that spread. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, said autonomous agents are transacting across global systems and cannot succeed without verifiable identity, and that under the foundation's neutral governance, ANS gives the industry a common foundation for trust. Cloudflare CTO Dane Knecht argued open standards are essential to making the agentic web trustworthy and interoperable, noting DNS is infrastructure the internet already relies on. GoDaddy chief strategy and legal officer Jared Sine said ANS adoption across a range of projects shows agents can be discovered and verified beyond any single proprietary platform.
Agent-related security incidents keep piling up, and knowing whom an agent represents before trusting it is becoming a precondition for organizations adopting agent services. By layering on DNS and certificates instead of building a new identity system, ANS keeps the adoption barrier low. The specification and open-source code are available through the agentnameservice project on GitHub.