AI agents get their own phone directory built atop DNS

AI + ML

DNS-AID, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, promises easier agent discovery

In the future, AI agents will be able to find one another using the Domain Name System (DNS), instead of crawling about and probing ports or checking configured resources.

That future begins now with DNS for AI Discovery (DNS-AID), an open source project intended to facilitate agent-to-agent discovery using existing internet infrastructure. The system has been built atop DNS to avoid the creation of yet another registry that has the potential to become a competitive chokepoint.

"Current approaches to agent connectivity are fragmented and often rely on fragile, hardcoded configurations,” said Ingmar Van Glabbeek, project maintainer for DNS-AID, in a statement. "With DNS-AID, we are moving toward a 'web-native' model for AI. By utilizing the existing DNS hierarchy, we enable developers to publish and discover agents with the same reliability and ubiquity that we’ve used to navigate the internet for decades."

DNS already provides various capabilities beyond domain name resolution. For example, websites expose their DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records via DNS TXT entries. And more recently, Service Binding (SVCB) and HTTPS RR (HTTPS Resource Records) were adopted to make it easier for clients to discover services and associated parameters.

DNS-AID utilizes SVCB (with TXT as a fallback) and optionally DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) TLSA records. These provide agents with a way to connect without a mediating entity, additional infrastructure, or a preferred protocol. DNS-AID supports MCP, A2A, HTTPS, and anything addressable via SVCB and ALPN. 

The system allows agents to be searched by name, by function, and by domain.

The Linux Foundation promises vendor-neutral governance for the project, which was initially developed by Infoblox.

"The Internet already solved the discovery problem decades ago with DNS – it's fast, it scales globally, and every network on earth understands it," said Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare, in a statement. "By extending this proven architecture to the agentic web, DNS-AID provides the foundational routing layer that autonomous systems need to operate safely and efficiently."

There are various ways to get started, the simplest of which is to install dns-aid and then issue the command dns-aid init. There is already a Python SDK, and presumably it won't be long before other languages have a reference implementation.

The setup process involves publishing an SVCB record for your agent to your site's DNS zone and signing the zone with DNSSEC as a verification of provenance. Thereafter, attempts to resolve the agent record _{agent-name}._{protocol}._agents.{your-domain} will return the relevant details, which can then be verified via DNSSEC, optional JWS signatures, and DANE policy before agents connect to one another.

Several DNS providers currently offer DNS-AID support, including AWS Route 53, Azure DNS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud DNS, Infoblox NIOS and UDDI, NS1, and any standards-compliant DNS service (RFC 2136 DDNS). Developers experimenting locally have the option to use a Docker BIND9 playground.

Global consultancy McKinsey argues that agent-to-agent commerce could be meaningful someday, calling it a "projected $3 trillion to $5 trillion economic opportunity." We note that McKinsey's 1980s prediction about the size of the mobile phone market in 2000 was off by about 100x. ®