Linux Foundation Announces DNS-AID Project to Advance Decentralized AI Agent Discovery

New project enables open, secure, decentralized connectivity for the emerging agentic web

SAN FRANCISCO, May 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of the DNS-AID project, an open source project enabling AI agents to discover and communicate with one another in a standard way. By leveraging the internet's existing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, DNS-AID provides a robust, decentralized alternative to the centralized registries and hardcoded URLs currently limiting AI interoperability.

As the AI ecosystem expands, the ability for autonomous agents to locate and verify each other across disparate platforms has become a critical bottleneck. The DNS-AID project, initially developed by Infoblox, enables agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to use DNS as a global, vendor-neutral directory. This approach ensures that agent discovery remains scalable, secure, and compatible with the foundational protocols of the internet.

"AI agents are quickly becoming the connective tissue of the modern internet, but without secure, open discovery infrastructure, that connectivity becomes a liability," said Jim Zemlin, CEO at the Linux Foundation. "DNS-AID helps anchor agent discovery in the DNS infrastructure the internet already trusts. The Linux Foundation provides the neutral home where this work can grow with the open governance, community collaboration, and long-term stability the emerging agentic web requires."

The DNS-AID project provides a reference implementation including a Python SDK, a command-line interface (CLI), and an MCP server, allowing developers to integrate agent discovery into their existing workflows immediately. Because the protocol is implementation-agnostic, it functions across any DNS provider, ensuring that organizations maintain control over their agent infrastructure without relying on proprietary, centralized services.

"Current approaches to agent connectivity are fragmented and often rely on fragile, hardcoded configurations," said Ingmar Van Glabbeek, project maintainer for DNS-AID. "With DNS-AID, we are moving toward a 'web-native' model for AI. By utilizing the existing DNS hierarchy, we enable developers to publish and discover agents with the same reliability and ubiquity that we've used to navigate the internet for decades. We look forward to building this community under the Linux Foundation to ensure the protocol evolves to meet the needs of the global AI developer community."

Under Linux Foundation governance, DNS-AID will remain vendor neutral, fostering transparent, community-driven growth, ensuring accessibility, and supporting sustainability.

The project is now open for contributions and community participation. To review the documentation, explore the reference implementation, and join the conversation, visit: https://github.com/dns-aid.

Supporting Quotes

"The Internet already solved the discovery problem decades ago with DNS – it's fast, it scales globally, and every network on earth understands it. By extending this proven architecture to the agentic web, DNS-AID provides the foundational routing layer that autonomous systems need to operate safely and efficiently. Cloudflare has always championed an open, interoperable Internet, and we are excited to support this project as it builds a decentralized future where AI scale isn't bottlenecked by centralized chokepoints."
– Dane Knecht, Chief Technology Officer, Cloudflare

"The Domain Name System has proven its resiliency and scalability across every major technological disruption and innovation. As AI ecosystems continue to evolve, domains, the DNS, and their associated security protocols will become a foundational trust layer for AI, ML, and LLM-driven systems, enabling agent identity, routing, security, and policy enforcement. Through the monitoring and enforcement of daily domain name behaviors across the internet, we have seen firsthand the emerging threat vectors targeting enterprises globally. Initiatives like DNS-AID are critical to ensuring that the domain and DNS ecosystem, and the internet's trusted infrastructure, evolve securely alongside the rise of AI-powered communication."
– Ihab Shraim, Chief Technology, Product and AI Officer, CSC

"As AI agents become a foundational part of how enterprises interact across digital ecosystems, open and neutral discovery mechanisms will be critical. DNS-AID represents a promising step toward standardizing how agents are discovered and trusted across hybrid and multicloud environments. At Equinix, we see this as complementary to enabling secure, high-performance interconnection across a globally distributed infrastructure."
– Kaladhar Voruganti, Vice President and Senior Technologist, Equinix

"The agentic internet is going to be built on the same DNS and public-CA infrastructure that carried the human web for 30 years, and that works because no single operator owns it. DNS-AID gives agent discovery a neutral DNS-layer protocol any resolver can implement. The Agent Name Service open standard then adds a layer of verification and identification any agent can use. Both standards compose with whatever sits above them at the application layer. DNS-AID and Agent Name Service at the Linux Foundation are part of a broader move toward open, interoperable building blocks for the evolving internet. The standards that succeed at internet scale are the open ones, well operated."
– Scott Courtney, Vice President, Engineering, GoDaddy

"The threat of shadow AI always lurks in the deployment of agentic AI agents. It seems to me that the business community and cybersecurity teams need a common interface/protocol that can be used at the time of agent deployment. With DNS-AID, end-users use a common convention (DNS) and an open standard to create scale for the proliferation of AI agents that will only grow exponentially."
– Chris Kissel, Research Vice President, IDC Security & Trust Team

"For forty years, DNS has quietly operated as the internet's largest distributed trust graph. Every name resolution is, in effect, a trust signal. The agentic Internet inherits that graph the moment we extend DNS to agents, which is exactly what DNS-AID does. The DNS-AID architecture enables further fine-grained trust bootstrapping by linking to AI-native artifacts like AgentCards as well as third-party verifiable attestations about the agent and the human or enterprise behind it."
– Ken Adler, Technical Fellow, AgenticIAM, Indeed

"DNS is already running everywhere agents will run. It's the only discovery system on the internet that is universally deployed, universally interoperable, and proven at planetary scale. DNS-AID extends what DNS has always done to AI agents that will increasingly act on our behalf. By standardizing how agents are published, discovered, and verified in DNS, it gives every operator, registrar, and platform one shared way to participate."
– Wei Chen, Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President, Regulatory Strategy, Infoblox

"This is exactly the kind of application that the DNS Service Binding (SVCB) and HTTPS records were designed for. By publishing metadata about available agents and their capabilities, the DNS-AID can provide a quick and efficient process for discovering resources on the Internet."
– Victoria Risk, BIND 9 Product Manager, Internet Systems Consortium

"Agent-to-agent communication is the next frontier of AI attack surface, and it's exactly the kind of challenge our ARMOR framework was built to address. DNS-AID gives enterprises an open, standards-based way to handle agent discovery and identity – a foundational control that maps directly to ARMOR's infrastructure security and secure AI operations domains. We've been telling clients there's no AI without ARMOR; open protocols like DNS-AID are what make that principle operational at internet scale."
– Chris Konrad, Vice President, Global Cyber, WWT

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects, including Linux, Kubernetes, Model Context Protocol (MCP), OpenChain, OpenSearch, OpenSSF, OpenStack, PyTorch, Ray, RISC-V, SPDX and Zephyr, provide the foundation for global infrastructure. The Linux Foundation is focused on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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