Vint Cerf joins effort to create identity standard for AI agents

Vint Cerf, one of the original architects of the protocols underlying the open internet, left Google after 20 years last week. Starting today, he is advising Innovation Labs, a subsidiary of Identity Digital—a company that operates DNS registry services. The organization's mission is to create an open architecture for AI agents to identify themselves, a capability that Cerf and others view as increasingly urgent. Innovation Labs has proposed DNSid, a system that creates cryptographic identities for AI agents and anchors each identity to an existing internet domain name, with proofs of registration logged over time. According to Allie Kline, Innovation Labs' interim CEO, the company is currently trialing these standards with several unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. Most AI agents in operation today remain within proprietary ecosystems, calling on internal resources for specific tasks. However, businesses are already planning for a future where agents operate far more autonomously across the broader internet and interact directly with other agents—a vision that raises critical governance questions. In an interview with TechCrunch, Cerf explained his reasoning: "I felt like I might be able to help them in a period of time when naming and identification is becoming increasingly important. 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." Cerf acknowledged that these questions will be difficult to resolve because AI agents are far more active than traditional domain names, and organizations have not yet defined what commitment they are making by registering a domain for an agent. Key to Innovation Labs' approach is its commitment not to pursue broader AI business ventures or own registration data—a deliberate choice, Kline said, to avoid "organ rejection to a hyperscaler releasing [a standard] and having that proprietary data." Cerf cautioned that multiple solutions to the identification problem are under consideration, and wide adoption will hinge on functionality and interoperability. He illustrated the stakes with a scenario: "Company X uses agent Y's technology, and company A uses agent C's technology, and then they don't interwork with each other. 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." When asked whether the so-called agentic economy is inevitable, Cerf demurred: "I don't think it's inevitable. 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 agent do something for us, we're very likely to choose to do that because [it's] just easier."

Vint Cerf's move to advise Innovation Labs marks a significant step toward solving a core challenge in the emerging AI agent economy. As Cerf noted, most AI agents today remain confined within proprietary systems, but the business vision is shifting toward agents that operate autonomously across the open internet and communicate directly with one another. This shift creates a novel governance problem: without a shared standard for identification and auditing, there is no reliable way to establish accountability, verify authority, or build trust in agent behavior. Cerf's involvement lends credibility to Innovation Labs' proposal, which distinguishes itself by refusing to own registration data or pursue broader AI business interests—a stance designed to reduce concern about proprietary lock-in from major cloud providers. The comparison Cerf drew to TCP/IP is instructive: just as that protocol succeeded because it solved an interoperability problem that users demanded, any agent identification standard will need to offer functionality that makes multi-agent, cross-company interaction possible and seamless. Multiple standards are already emerging, and the competitive landscape remains open.

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