Linux Foundation Welcomes Agent Name Service to Bring Verifiable Identity and Discovery to AI Agents

Open standard builds on DNS and the certificates websites already use to verify AI agent identities; 11 organizations support the project

Summary

• On Nov. 10, 2026, the Linux Foundation welcomed Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard that enables trusted identity, verification and discovery for AI agents using existing DNS infrastructure.
• The complete ANS specification, now developed in the open by the project's technical steering committee, consists of seven documents detailing domain-anchored naming, registration and versioning, DNS publication, public log auditing, integrity monitoring, and agent-to-agent authentication.
• Eleven organizations support ANS, with early use across industry platforms, including support in AGNTCY's Agent Directory Service and ANS Finder interoperability with Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD).
• To learn more about ANS, visit https://ansinfo.ai/.

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America - The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced that Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard built on Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure that provides trusted identity, verification, and discovery for AI agents operating across the internet, has launched as a Linux Foundation project.

The ANS specification defines how AI agents are named and registered, how their identities are published through DNS, and how those identities can be verified. It also outlines how to monitor identity records for unauthorized changes and how agents can verify one another's identities. This gives developers a common framework for building systems that work across platforms and services. The specification is now formalized and will be governed by the project's technical steering committee under the Linux Foundation.

"Autonomous AI agents are transacting and operating across global systems, but they can't succeed without verifiable identity," said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. "Under the neutral governance of the Linux Foundation, ANS provides a common foundation for trust that the entire industry can adopt, implement and improve together."

Tools that help AI agents find one another now use ANS identities. The AGNTCY Agent Directory Service, another Linux Foundation project, supports verification of ANS identities. Separately, ANS Finder implements the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification and passes its registry conformance tests, showing how agent discovery can incorporate verifiable identities. Together, these developments show early adoption of ANS and progress toward making verifiable agent identities work across different systems.

"Agent identity is essential to building trust in the agentic open internet, and open standards lay the foundation for ensuring it stays open," said Jared Sine, Chief Strategy and Legal Officer at GoDaddy. "Agent Name Service is core to both, and we're already seeing ANS adopted across a range of projects – showing how agents can be discovered and verified beyond any single proprietary platform. That momentum is an exciting tailwind for bringing the agentic open internet to life, and we're grateful to the Linux Foundation and the growing community of contributors helping turn a shared standard into practical infrastructure for an agentic open web."

Since ANS's intent to launch in June, 11 organizations have contributed to or adopted the standard, including Cisco, Cloudflare, DigiCert, DistributedApps.ai, GoDaddy, HOL, Infoblox, Radix, Salesforce, OWASP and Trustmodel.ai.

To learn more about ANS, visit https://ansinfo.ai/. To read the specification, run the open source code, or contribute, visit https://github.com/agentnameservice.

Supporting Quotes
"Recent high-profile security incidents involving AI agents have reinforced a fundamental requirement for the agentic web: organizations need to know who an agent represents before trusting it to act. ANS builds on DNS to help answer that question using infrastructure the Internet already relies on, rather than creating another proprietary system. At Cloudflare, we believe open standards are essential to making the agentic web both trustworthy and interoperable"
– Dane Knecht, Chief Technology Officer, Cloudflare

"Before an organization gives an AI agent access to its systems or data, it needs to verify that agent's identity. Think of it as a passport for AI agents, which is a concept ANS helps advance across platforms and organizational boundaries by bringing together DNS and certificate-based identity. DigiCert supports this open approach as part of a broader enterprise imperative of knowing which agents are operating, controlling what they can do, and having the ability to revoke their access when trust changes."
– Brian Trzupek, Senior Vice President Product Management, DigiCert

"I led the initial development of ANS, and I am very glad to see the momentum and adoption that many organizations have built around it. By hosting ANS under neutral governance, the Linux Foundation gives the whole ecosystem a trusted home for agent registration, discovery, and security governance. I look forward to joining the technical steering committee and contributing further as the specification evolves in the open."
– Ken Huang, CEO, DistributedApps.ai

"AI agents aren't going to operate at internet scale if every platform has its own way of identifying them. I believe ANS is foundational to the future of AI because it builds on DNS, infrastructure the internet already relies on, to give agents identities that others can verify. At HOL, we've been working with GoDaddy on standards that allow those identities to be discovered across ecosystems and their histories to be independently verified. Bringing ANS under the Linux Foundation is an important step toward ensuring agent identity remains open, interoperable, and accessible to everyone."
– Michael Kantor, President, HOL

"Each new kind of internet participant has needed proof of identity: websites got certificates, email got verified domains. AI agents are next; spending money and making commitments for people and businesses. Those actions are only as accountable as the identity behind them. ANS gives agents that proof, and neutral governance at the Linux Foundation keeps it independent of any platform. With ANS, accountability becomes a property of the system, not a promise."
– Mehul Aggarwal, Independent Researcher, Agentic Web

"Trust in agentic commerce starts with knowing who an agent represents and where it can be found. At Infoblox, we see domains as a globally established, familiar naming and discovery layer for agents and MCP servers. Open standards and cryptographically verifiable signals can help organizations check identity and provenance and make more informed trust decisions. By bringing Agent Name Service to the Linux Foundation, we can advance this capability in a neutral, collaborative community."
– Wei Chen, Chief Legal Officer and Executive Vice President, Regulatory Strategy, Infoblox

"When it comes to autonomous AI, it is clear that no single organization will own or control the agent ecosystem. Success depends on a foundation that is open, interoperable, and decentralized. The Agent Name Service enables trusted agent identity, while the AGNTCY Directory enables agent discovery. Together, they allow agents to be both verified and found across organizations and vendors. Integrating ANS into the AGNTCY Directory is a practical step toward an open, trusted ecosystem that the entire industry can build on together."
– Guillaume de Saint Marc, Vice President of Engineering, Outshift by Cisco

"Domain names and DNS remain the most open and sovereign way for people and businesses to own, operate and control their identity on the internet. ANS carries that into an agent-driven internet, so the businesses behind AI agents don't have to depend on closed, private ecosystems to be discovered and trusted. Radix is proud to support ANS, and we look forward to helping champion it under the Linux Foundation."
– Sandeep Ramchandani, CEO, Radix

"True agentic transformation and AI scale require an open ecosystem where agents can be discovered, verified, and trusted across organizational boundaries. ANS will help set a global framework for agent identity to help ensure security and traceability. By aligning on open standards like ANS, Salesforce's Agent Fabric gives organizations deeper governance across diverse platforms, allowing developers the freedom to build anywhere while meeting enterprise security standards."
– Andrew Comstock, Senior Vice President and General Manager, MuleSoft & Agent Fabric, Salesforce

"Identity is the first question in agent trust, not the last. Before you can score, audit, or govern an AI agent, you have to know exactly which agent you're dealing with – and that answer can't belong to any one vendor. Neutral governance under the Linux Foundation makes ANS a shared trust anchor the whole industry can build on. At TrustModel.ai, we're anchoring agent TrustScores to ANS identities."
– Karl Mehta, Founder and Chairman, TrustModel.ai (Stanford StartX Company)

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.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of the Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
The Linux Foundation
[email protected] 

SOURCE The Linux Foundation