GoDaddy has launched a global trusted identity framework for artificial intelligence agents, aiming to address a growing concern around the rise of rogue and impersonating bots as AI agents increasingly interact with one another across the internet.
With more than one billion AI agents expected to be built by businesses alone over the next three years, the industry faces a fundamental trust challenge: how to reliably distinguish legitimate agents from malicious ones, and how to ensure the integrity of agent-to-agent communication. As autonomous agents begin to negotiate, transact and collaborate without direct human involvement, the risks associated with spoofed or unverified identities grow sharply.
To address this, GoDaddy has founded the Agent Name Service (ANS), positioning it as the internet’s first open trust layer designed specifically for AI agents. ANS is built as an open standard that allows developers, organisations and users to verify, discover and register AI agents using familiar internet infrastructure.
Rather than creating an entirely new system, ANS is anchored in the same foundations that underpin the modern web: domain names, the Domain Name System (DNS) and public key infrastructure (PKI) certificates. Under the standard, every registered AI agent is assigned a unique, human-readable name and a cryptographically verifiable identity. This enables agents to be authenticated, governed and discovered across the open internet, while giving users clarity about who—or what—they are interacting with.
As an early implementation of the standard, GoDaddy has launched the ANS Registry, which binds an AI agent’s identity directly to a domain name. This allows anyone to confirm an agent’s domain ownership and, where extended verification is applied, its organisational identity as well. Agents registered through the ANS Registry receive an “ANS-verified” badge, designed to help users quickly differentiate trusted agents from potentially malicious or impersonating bots.
According to GoDaddy, the initiative builds on its long-standing role in managing internet trust at scale through domains, DNS and SSL certificates, extending those principles into the emerging AI agent ecosystem.
“AI should move the world forward without putting people at risk,” said Travis Muhlestein, product and AI chief technology officer at GoDaddy. “ANS provides responsible builders with a clear badge of trust, while giving users a simple way to understand who—and what—is behind an AI agent.”
By introducing a verifiable naming and identity layer for AI agents, GoDaddy is seeking to establish early guardrails for an internet where autonomous systems increasingly operate alongside—and with—humans.