Vint Cerf has begun advising Innovation Labs to establish a standard for identifying AI agents on the open internet.
Cerf, one of the architects of the protocols behind the web, left Google after 20 years last week. He is now focusing on digital identity. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company. The group believes domain-name infrastructure offers a practical way to hold AI agents accountable. They expect online interaction between agents to eventually surpass interaction between people.
Cerf joins a small group of internet figures lending their names to the project. Most AI agents currently operate within proprietary systems, calling on internal resources for specific tasks. Businesses are already planning a future where they operate more autonomously across the web and interact directly with other agents. A lack of a shared standard for identification and auditing has blocked progress so far.
Several standards are beginning to emerge. Innovation Labs has proposed DNSid, a registry for agent identification. It links each agent to an existing internet domain name. The system uses cryptographic proofs to log registration over time. Innovation Labs’ interim CEO Allie Kline says the company is trialing the standards with several unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies.
“I felt like I might be able to help them in a period of time when naming and identification is becoming increasingly important,” Cerf told TechCrunch. “This is largely triggered by the notion of AI agents and the question of what authorities they have, where they have derived those authorities, who is accountable for the behavior of an agent in this context, and where and how its identity is established, and why [you’d] trust it.”
Those questions are complicated, Cerf says, because AI agents are far more active than domains. It is not yet clear what commitment an organisation makes when registering one.
“It’s going to be a fascinating—and at the same time maybe even exasperating—period in the in the evolution of the internet and the things that depend on it, because the functionality is so dramatically powerful,” Cerf said.
With multiple solutions under consideration, Cerf says the key to wide adoption of any protocol will be its functionality.
“Company X uses agent Y’s technology, and company A uses agent C’s technology, and then they don’t interwork with each other,” Cerf said. “Nobody can do everything that you might want every agent to do… and so we’re going to have to rely on the pressure coming from the users. This is what happened with TCP/IP.”
One key to Innovation Labs’ proposal is that it does not come with broader plans to run other AI businesses or own the registration data. Kline says there is often resistance to a hyperscaler releasing a standard and holding that proprietary data.
And does Cerf think the agentic economy is the internet’s destiny?
“I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he said. “But what I do think is inevitable is that people will try to do that. We are fundamentally lazy creatures, and if we find a way to have an an agent do something for us, we’re very likely to choose to do that because [it’s] just easier.”
What it means
People making things will face a new requirement for verification. Tools will need to prove who they are and who authorised them before other systems will talk to them. This adds a layer of setup that does not exist for standard software today.
