Infoblox and GoDaddy Inc. (NYSE: GDDY) announced support for open standards designed to help AI agents identify, discover and verify one another across the internet, according to a company statement.

Infoblox is advancing DNS for AI Discovery (DNS-AID), an approach for agent discovery built on existing Domain Name System infrastructure. GoDaddy is developing Agent Name Service (ANS), a standard focused on agent identity, naming and verification using DNS and public key infrastructure.

DNS-AID is advancing as an Internet Engineering Task Force draft and defines how AI agents can publish discoverable metadata using existing DNS record types. The standard is not owned by any company and can be implemented by any organization, platform, registry or agent framework.

Agent Name Service is designed to let agent operators use domain names they already own without requiring a new registry or proprietary naming system. GoDaddy is a co-author of the ANS IETF draft and contributor to its open-source implementation.

"Agents will only reach their full potential on the open web if people and systems can verify who they are interacting with," said Jared Sine, chief strategy and legal officer at GoDaddy. "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."

The two standards are complementary, with ANS focusing on agent identity and DNS-AID addressing agent discovery. Both use DNS and PKI foundations and are being developed to work alongside each other.

"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, chief legal officer at Infoblox. "DNS replaced it, not with another centralized list, but with an open, federated protocol that anyone could participate in."

The companies stated they believe no single or small group of vendors should control how AI agents are named, discovered or verified as agents begin operating across websites, applications and enterprise environments.