Infoblox and GoDaddy announced support for complementary open standards designed to help AI agents identify, discover and verify one another across the open web.
Infoblox is advancing DNS for AI Discovery (DNS-AID), an open, interoperable approach for agent discovery built on existing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure. GoDaddy is helping develop Agent Name Service (ANS), an open standard focused on agent identity, naming and verification using DNS and public key infrastructure (PKI). Both efforts are complementary and are being developed in community standards bodies with the explicit goal of enabling independent implementations and avoiding single- or concentrated-vendor control.
The companies share a belief that no single or small group of vendors, registries or platforms should control how AI agents are named, discovered or verified. As agents begin to act across websites, applications and enterprise environments, open standards will be essential to help people and systems know which agents they are interacting with and whether those agents are verified.
“Agents will only reach their full potential on the open web if people and systems can verify who they are interacting with,” said Jared Sine, chief strategy and legal officer at GoDaddy. “Adopters of the Agent Name Service open standard leverages the only infrastructure that exists today that operates at the scale and speed of the global internet – Domain Name Service. We support Infoblox’s work on DNS-AID and believe open standards for identity, discovery and verification will be critical as agents become part of everyday digital experiences.”
“The lesson we learned from the 1970s-1980s is simple: no single entity could or should run the phonebook of the internet for everyone,” said Wei Chen, CLO, EVP, Regulatory Strategy at Infoblox. “DNS replaced it, not with another centralised list, but with an open, federated protocol that anyone could participate in. Forty years later, DNS remains the gold standard for digital trust and a scalable foundation where agents, Model Context Protocols, services and endpoints can be discovered and trusted through the same architecture that already powers the global economy.”
What is DNS-AID?
DNS-AID is an open standard, currently advancing as an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft and open-source software, that defines how AI agents can publish discoverable metadata using existing DNS record types, including RFC 9460 Service Bindings (SVCB), DNS-SD service discovery, Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE). DNS-AID is not owned by any company; it is a community standard that any organisation, platform, registry or agent framework can implement.
By advancing DNS-AID, Infoblox is helping establish a standards-based discovery layer for agents. GoDaddy supports the goal of open, DNS-based agent discovery and believes DNS-AID complements ANS by addressing a related but distinct need: helping agents and systems find the metadata needed to evaluate and connect with one another.
What is the Agent Name Service?
Agent Name Service is an open standard and implementation for AI agent identity, naming and verification, built on DNS and PKI. GoDaddy is a co-author of the ANS IETF draft and a significant contributor to its open-source implementation.
ANS is designed to let agent operators use domain names they already own—without requiring a new registry or proprietary naming system. This helps make agents identifiable and addressable through the same established internet infrastructure that already supports websites and email.
Shared principles
ANS is anchored on agent identity: giving agents unique names and the cryptographic proof to back them. DNS-AID focuses on agent discovery: defining how agents’ capabilities and endpoints are published in DNS so other systems can find them. The two efforts share a DNS and PKI foundation and are being developed to fit alongside each other in DNS as complementary parts of an open agentic internet. Put simply: ANS answers who an agent is, and DNS-AID helps others find what it can do.
Infoblox and GoDaddy believe agent discovery and identity should be open and interoperable, not tied to proprietary protocols or closed registries. Agent deployers should retain control over their agents’ identity, metadata, discoverability and policies, and trust decisions should be based on open, auditable, cryptographically verifiable signals rather than proprietary reputation scores controlled by a single vendor.
Why DNS?
DNS is already globally deployed, federated, extensible and supported by mature operational and security practices. Building agent identity and discovery on DNS means inheriting decades of operational experience, caching infrastructure, anycast resilience, governance process and an installed base that reaches every device on the internet. SVCB records provide an extensible record format that can support agent capabilities, endpoints and protocols.
An open invitation
Infoblox and GoDaddy recognise that it will take the industry to come together to define the future of the agentic internet. “We are calling on cloud providers, agent platform vendors, registrars, security companies and standards organisations to join us in open standards work,” continued Wei, “so that AI agents can be discovered and verified through open infrastructure that is fully federated and distributed and works for everyone.”