GoDaddy and Salesforce Forge AI 'Digital Passport' to Tame Agent Sprawl

TEMPE, Ariz. – February 19, 2026 – As companies race to deploy autonomous AI agents, a critical question is slowing progress: How do you know who—or what—to trust? Addressing this burgeoning identity crisis, GoDaddy and Salesforce today announced a landmark integration designed to bring order to the chaotic world of enterprise AI.

The collaboration connects GoDaddy's new Agent Name Service (ANS) with Salesforce's MuleSoft Agent Fabric, creating a robust system for discovering, verifying, and governing the AI agents rapidly multiplying within corporate networks. The solution aims to prevent "rogue agents" from accessing sensitive systems by providing what executives are calling a "digital passport" for every automated entity.

The Wild West of Enterprise AI

The explosion of generative AI has ushered in an era of autonomous agents—software programs capable of performing complex, multi-step tasks across various systems. While promising unprecedented efficiency, this rapid proliferation has created a new digital frontier fraught with risk, often described by industry experts as "agent sprawl."

Many organizations find themselves in a difficult position. Teams across different departments deploy agents from various platforms, often without a centralized registry or consistent security protocol. This creates a landscape of "shadow AI," where unvetted agents operate outside of IT's visibility, potentially accessing confidential data or interacting with critical infrastructure. According to market research from Gartner, the challenge is set to intensify, with a prediction that 60% of enterprises will have deployed multiple autonomous agents by 2026, yet less than half will possess the necessary governance frameworks to manage them.

The security implications are significant. Without a reliable way to confirm an agent's origin, publisher, and trustworthiness, businesses are vulnerable to a new class of threats. These include identity-based attacks where malicious agents impersonate legitimate ones, theft of agent credentials like API keys, and data exfiltration through compromised or over-privileged agents. The global AI governance market is projected to skyrocket to over $4.8 billion by 2034, a clear indicator of the urgent demand for solutions that can mitigate these risks.

A 'Digital Passport' Built on Internet Foundations

GoDaddy, the world's largest domain registrar, is leveraging its foundational expertise in internet identity to tackle this problem. The company's new Agent Name Service (ANS) extends the functionality of the public Domain Name System (DNS)—the internet's global phonebook—to register and verify AI agents.

The process is elegantly simple in concept. When an organization develops an AI agent, it can register it through ANS, which publishes the agent's identity to the DNS. This creates a permanent, verifiable link between the AI agent and the owner's domain name. Much like a domain name points to a specific website, this new record points to a trusted AI agent.

"The agentic ecosystem on the open internet is exploding, so trust and identity need to keep up," said Travis Muhlestein, chief technology officer of product and AI at GoDaddy, in a statement. "This integration helps organizations verify the identity of AI agents so they can scale adoption with stronger confidence and accountability."

Once registered, an agent becomes discoverable from any network on earth within seconds. Crucially, this identity is backed by cryptographic proof. While technical details are still emerging, this approach likely utilizes standards similar to DNSSEC (DNS Security Extensions), which uses digital signatures to guarantee the authenticity of DNS data. This "digital passport" allows any other system or agent to verify an agent's identity using standard DNS queries, with no special tools required. It's a strategic move for GoDaddy, pivoting its core competency in domain management to provide essential infrastructure for the burgeoning AI economy.

MuleSoft's Governance Engine Meets Verified Identity

This verifiable identity layer becomes actionable through the integration with Salesforce's MuleSoft Agent Fabric. MuleSoft's platform is designed to be the central control plane for an enterprise's entire digital workforce, providing tools for discovery, orchestration, and governance of any AI agent, regardless of where it was built.

MuleSoft Agent Fabric is built on four key pillars: an Agent Registry to catalog all agents, an Agent Broker to intelligently route tasks, Agent Governance to enforce security policies, and an Agent Visualizer to provide real-time observability. The platform's core weakness, until now, was the initial point of trust: how to safely discover and onboard agents from the outside world.

The new integration solves this problem directly. MuleSoft customers can now configure GoDaddy's ANS as a trusted source for agent discovery. MuleSoft's Agent Scanners will pull verified agents from the ANS into the MuleSoft Agent Registry. Inside the registry, IT and security teams can see each agent's verification status, publisher details, and click through to the cryptographic proof of its identity.

With this verified identity in hand, teams can then use MuleSoft's governance tools to set granular policies that determine which APIs, data, and systems the agent is permitted to access. This ensures that even before an agent performs its first task, its identity is confirmed and its permissions are strictly defined, dramatically reducing the risk of unauthorized access or malicious activity.

Charting a Course for a Secure AI Ecosystem

This partnership signals a critical maturation in the enterprise AI market, moving from unbridled experimentation to the establishment of foundational trust and security protocols. By combining a universal, DNS-based identity system with a sophisticated enterprise governance platform, GoDaddy and Salesforce are providing a scalable blueprint for safely adopting agentic AI.

"Open ecosystems have always been critical for enterprise success, and we are committed to building one where customers can safely discover and govern AI agents, regardless of where they originated," noted Andrew Comstock, SVP & GM of MuleSoft at Salesforce. He added that the integration provides the "digital passport customers need to manage agent sprawl and help ensure every agent in their catalog is authenticated and trustworthy."

While other companies are also tackling the AI governance challenge, the GoDaddy-MuleSoft approach stands out by leveraging the internet's most established and universally recognized directory. Instead of creating a new proprietary identity silo, it builds upon the public DNS, promoting an open and interoperable standard for AI identity. This foundational layer of trust is essential as organizations increasingly rely on autonomous agents to collaborate not just internally, but also with agents from partners, suppliers, and customers across the open internet. As agentic AI projects move from the lab to become core components of business operations, this ability to verify and trust at scale will no longer be a feature, but a fundamental requirement for success.