As enterprises deploy increasing numbers of AI agents across applications and organizations, the Linux Foundation on Wednesday announced plans to launch a new Agent Name Service framework designed to establish identity, ownership, and trust for these systems.
The , the Foundation said in a statement.
Just like DNS translates human-readable website names into internet addresses, ANS aims to create a standardized naming and discovery layer for AI agents, with the ability for enterprises to publish agent identities through domains they already control, enabling other agents and systems to verify who an agent represents and discover information about its capabilities and ownership before interacting with it, it added.
This, the Foundation further added, creates a federated mechanism for agent discovery and verification without any reliance on any proprietary registry or centralized control.
Growing demand for an agent identity framework
ANS solves an emerging problem for enterprises, especially in scaling AI deployments, said , director analyst at Gartner: “Agent identity has moved from an architectural consideration to an operational control-plane gap.”
“The evidence we see from enterprise clients is consistent: they need to know which agent acted, who it represented, what authority it had, and whether its runtime behavior matched its intended design,” Prakash said.
Beyond the problem ANS seeks to solve, analysts also said the framework’s architecture could prove equally important for enterprise adoption.
“For enterprises, one of ANS’s biggest advantages may be its reliance on DNS, especially since they already use it to manage domains and trust. It avoids creating a new registry and lets companies publish and verify agent identities using existing internet infrastructure, making adoption easier and cheaper,” said , AI development manager at IT consulting firm Kanerika.
However, there are downsides to being built on DNS, especially on the security front, Dai cautioned.
“DNS was not originally designed for high-assurance identity. This will make it susceptible to spoofing, hijacking, and latency or propagation inconsistencies that can undermine trust guarantees,” Dai said.
To bypass these security concerns, enterprises should complement ANS with and , a proposed framework that uses DNS records to help agents advertise their capabilities and make themselves discoverable across networks. Another is .
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