The Linux Foundation has taken stewardship of GoDaddy’s Agent Name Service (ANS), creating an open standard for AI agent identity that aims to improve security, interoperability and trust as enterprise adoption accelerates.
The Linux Foundation has launched and endorsed the Agent Name Service (ANS), an open identity framework for AI agents originally developed by GoDaddy, marking a major step towards establishing an open, interoperable trust layer for the rapidly growing agentic AI ecosystem.
Backed by Cisco, Cloudflare, Salesforce and Infoblox, ANS leverages the existing Domain Name System (DNS) to identify, verify and locate AI agents across the internet. The open framework is designed to help organisations authenticate agent identities, validate permissions, verify code integrity and operational history, and defend against command, prompt and tool injection attacks.
The announcement comes as AI agents emerge as a significant cybersecurity concern. Citing World Economic Forum research, the Linux Foundation noted that 82% of executives plan to adopt AI agents within the next one to three years, underscoring the need for trusted identity infrastructure.
ANS also supports Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), enabling organisations to integrate existing identity systems into a unified verification model without replacing current infrastructure.
The ecosystem is 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. 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,” said Jared Sine, Chief Strategy and Legal Officer of GoDaddy.
