The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit best known for shepherding open-source software including Linux and Kubernetes, on Tuesday said it intends to launch the Agent Name Service, an open standard meant to give AI agents trusted identity, verification, and discovery across the internet.
The framework builds on the Domain Name System, the decades-old infrastructure that routes web traffic, anchoring each agent's identity to a domain its operator already owns rather than to a proprietary registry, according to a press release. It lets systems verify who an agent represents, what permissions it holds, and whether its code and history remain authentic and unchanged.
The move cements a concerted push by the foundation to expand its mandate to become a central coordinator of standards underpinning agentic development . The foundation already houses the Anthropic-created Model Context Protocol (MCP) for connecting AI models to tools, and in April took over governance of x402, the Coinbase-built protocol that lets agents pay with crypto wallets.
ANS also wades into territory already staked out by blockchain projects racing to solve agent identity. Ethereum's ERC-8004 standard, which created an on-chain identity registry for "trustless agents," went live on mainnet earlier this year and has since spawned tens of thousands of registrations on other chains such as BNB Smart Chain. Privado ID, a zero-knowledge identity toolkit formerly known as Polygon ID, is pitching its own decentralized verification layer for both people and AI agents. The difference with ANS is that it needs no blockchain at all, extending DNS instead.
"AI agents will increasingly operate across enterprises, platforms, and digital services, which makes trusted identity infrastructure a foundational requirement," said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. "By building on DNS and open standards, ANS creates a scalable and interoperable framework for verified agent communication across the global digital economy."
The foundation said the project, which also supports decentralized identifiers and Legal Entity Identifiers, is still seeking participation from enterprises, developers, and security researchers, with technical repositories to be published through an Agent Name Service GitHub organization. Backers cited in the announcement include GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Cisco, Salesforce, and Infoblox.
(HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS STORY: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to handle press-release rewrites. I then edited it using our DistroVerse editing interface, and added a story illustration made with ChatGPT. I personally checked all the facts prior to publication.)