// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Agent Name Service is Now Part of The Linux Foundation
Agent Name Service (ANS) now has a home at the Linux Foundation. The launch happened at KubeCon North America in Salt Lake City, and you might remember that the foundation first announced its plans for the project way back in June.
GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Salesforce, and DigiCert are among the organizations now involved with ANS, bringing the total number up to eleven.
One of the early deployments of ANS has been in AGNTCY, another project under the foundation, where its directory of AI agents can now check an agent’s ANS identity.
Announcing the move, Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, had this to share:
Platforms identify AI agents in their own ways, and a service that receives a request from one has no standardized way to confirm who the agent represents.
ANS tackles this by linking each agent to a domain name its operator owns, the same way a website is tied to its domain. Each version of an agent gets its own name, such as ans://v1.4.2.travel.example.com.
To register an agent, the operator first has to prove it controls that domain. Certificates are then issued for the agent, and every registration goes into a public log that anyone can read.
ANS also publishes details about each agent in DNS, the internet's address book, and other systems can then look them up with tools they already use.
The main DNS records use a format from a separate project called DNS-AID. ANS adds one record of its own that points to the agent's entry in the public log.
When an agent sends a request, the receiving system can check that its registration exists, that it has not been revoked, and that the agent really holds the key tied to it.