DNS Gets a New Job: Securing the Future of AI Agents

SANTA CLARA, Calif. and TEMPE, Ariz. – May 14, 2026 – As artificial intelligence rapidly evolves from a tool into a legion of autonomous agents poised to reshape the internet, two of the web's foundational players are stepping up to answer a critical question: In a world of automated actors, who can you trust?

Infoblox, a leader in network security, and GoDaddy, the world's largest domain registrar, have announced their joint support for a pair of complementary open standards designed to give AI agents a verifiable identity. By leveraging the internet's 40-year-old Domain Name System (DNS), the initiative aims to create a transparent, decentralized, and secure framework for AI agents to identify, discover, and verify one another, preventing a future dominated by proprietary, closed-off systems.

Building Trust in the Age of Autonomous Agents

The vision of an “agentic internet,” where AI agents autonomously book travel, manage calendars, and conduct business transactions, is fast approaching. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents. But this automated future carries inherent risks. Without a reliable way to verify an agent's identity and authority, the door is open to fraud, misinformation, and security breaches on an unprecedented scale.

This is the problem Infoblox and GoDaddy aim to solve. Their proposal repurposes DNS—the globally distributed database that translates human-readable domain names like godaddy.com into machine-readable IP addresses—to serve as a universal identity card for AI agents. The companies argue that instead of building a new, centralized directory, the world should use the proven, resilient, and federated infrastructure that already powers the global economy.

“The lesson we learned from the 1970s to 1980s is simple: no single entity could or should run the phonebook of the internet for everyone,” said Wei Chen, CLO and EVP of Regulatory Strategy at Infoblox. “DNS replaced it, not with another centralized list, but with an open, federated protocol that anyone could participate in. Forty years later, DNS remains the gold standard for digital trust.”

GoDaddy's Chief Strategy and Legal Officer, Jared Sine, echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the practical need for verification. “Agents will only reach their full potential on the open web if people and systems can verify who they are interacting with,” he stated. “Adopters of the Agent Name Service open standard leverages the only infrastructure that exists today that operates at the scale and speed of the global internet—Domain Name Service.”

A Tale of Two Standards: Identity and Discovery

The joint effort is built on two distinct but interconnected open standards, both currently advancing through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body responsible for developing internet standards.

GoDaddy is championing the Agent Name Service (ANS), which focuses on identity. ANS is designed to answer the question, “Who is this agent?” It allows an agent operator to use a domain name they already own to create a unique, cryptographically verifiable identity for their agent. Built on DNS and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), ANS provides agents with a unique name and the cryptographic proof to back it up, much like an SSL certificate provides proof of a website's identity. The standard proposes verification tiers—Bronze, Silver, and Gold—allowing systems to choose an assurance level based on the risk of a given transaction.

Complementing this is Infoblox's DNS for AI Discovery (DNS-AID), which focuses on discovery. DNS-AID tackles the question, “What can this agent do?” It defines how agents can publish metadata about their capabilities, services, and communication endpoints using existing DNS record types like Service Bindings (SVCB) and DNS-based Service Discovery (DNS-SD). This allows other agents and systems to find them and understand how to interact with them securely.

In simple terms, ANS provides the agent’s passport, while DNS-AID lists its skills and contact information on a public resume. Together, they create a comprehensive framework for trusted interactions, all anchored to an organization's established domain name.

The Battle for an Open 'Agentic Internet'

The Infoblox and GoDaddy initiative is a significant move in a larger, industry-wide push to define the rules for the emerging agentic internet. The core debate mirrors the internet's own history: will the future be built on open, interoperable protocols accessible to all, or will it be fragmented into proprietary “walled gardens” controlled by a few tech giants?

Several major players are developing their own solutions. Google is promoting its Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol as a “lingua franca” for inter-agent communication, while Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a widely adopted standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data. Meanwhile, standards bodies like the W3C and government agencies like the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are also racing to develop guidelines for AI agent security, identity, and governance.

By building their standards on DNS and advancing them through the open IETF process, Infoblox and GoDaddy are making a clear statement in favor of a decentralized, federated model. They are actively calling on cloud providers, AI platform vendors, and security companies to join the effort.

“We are calling on cloud providers, agent platform vendors, registrars, security companies and standards organizations to join us in open standards work,” Chen urged. “We believe AI agents should be discovered and verified through open infrastructure that is fully federated and distributed.”

DNS’s Unexpected Second Act

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this initiative is its reliance on DNS, a technology that has quietly and reliably served as the internet's backbone for decades. Its selection is a testament to its enduring design principles. DNS is already globally deployed, massively scalable, and supported by mature security practices like DNSSEC and DANE, which provide cryptographic integrity for its data.

Building agent identity on top of this existing infrastructure means inheriting decades of operational experience, caching infrastructure, and governance processes that reach every device on the internet. It avoids the monumental task of creating, deploying, and securing a new global identity system from scratch.

This “unexpected second act” for DNS demonstrates the power of foundational internet protocols to adapt to new paradigms. Just as it guided the growth of the world wide web and email, the internet's humble phonebook is now being positioned to guide the next evolution of the internet—one driven not just by human clicks, but by the autonomous actions of intelligent agents. The success of these open standards could determine whether that future is one of chaotic risk or one of trusted, automated opportunity.