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Linux Foundation Takes Stewardship of GoDaddy's Agent Name Service, Backing Open DNS-Based AI Agent Identity
The Linux Foundation has launched and endorsed the Agent Name Service (ANS), an open identity framework for AI agents originally developed by GoDaddy, leveraging DNS to identify, verify, and locate AI agents across the internet.
The Linux Foundation has taken stewardship of GoDaddy's Agent Name Service (ANS), launching an open identity framework for AI agents that leverages the existing Domain Name System (DNS) to identify, verify, and locate AI agents across the internet. The move marks a major step toward establishing an open, interoperable trust layer for the rapidly growing agentic AI ecosystem.
Backed by Cisco, Cloudflare, Salesforce, and Infoblox, ANS is designed to help organizations authenticate agent identities, validate permissions, verify code integrity and operational history, and defend against command, prompt, and tool injection attacks. As enterprises accelerate AI agent adoption, the framework provides critical security infrastructure built on the proven backbone of DNS.
The announcement comes amid growing cybersecurity concerns around AI agents. Citing research from the World Economic Forum, the Linux Foundation noted that 82% of executives plan to adopt AI agents within the next one to three years, underscoring the urgent need for trusted identity infrastructure.
ANS also supports Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), enabling organizations to integrate existing identity systems into a unified verification model without replacing current infrastructure. The ecosystem is further expanding through complementary initiatives, including Infoblox's DNS-AID for open AI agent discovery and a GoDaddy-Cloudflare partnership that integrates AI crawler controls while improving AI agent identification across the web.
"The success of the internet didn't come from proprietary systems — it came from open standards, shared infrastructure, and an ecosystem committed to working together," said Jared Sine, Chief Strategy and Legal Officer of GoDaddy. "We're grateful to the many organizations and contributors who helped advance Agent Name Service and bring that same collaborative approach to the age of AI agents."
Why it matters
By bringing DNS — the internet's core identity infrastructure — into the AI agent authentication layer, the Linux Foundation is laying the groundwork for an open standard that could become the "domain name system" for the agentic AI era.