Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet

Vint Cerf says his favorite places are places he’s never been to before.

Cerf, one of the architects of the protocols behind the open internet, left Google last week after 20 years, but he’s not done thinking about the digital future. Starting today, he is advising Innovation Labs, an organization seeking to build an open architecture for AI agents to identify themselves.

Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company. The company sees domain name infrastructure as a practical way to put the responsibility on AI agents and move toward a future where more online interactions occur between agents than humans. Cerf joins several other Internet luminaries who have lent their names to this effort.

Currently, most AI agents remain within their own systems and call upon internal resources for specific purposes. But companies are already envisioning a world where they operate far more autonomously on the Internet and interact directly with other agents. To date, the main obstacle has been the lack of common standards for identifying and auditing agents.

Various standards are starting to emerge, and Innovation Labs proposed DNSid. DNSid is a registry for agent identification that links each to an existing Internet domain name and records its registration over time using cryptographic certificates. Allie Kline, Interim CEO of Innovation Labs, said the company is testing the standard with several unknown hyperscalers and identity companies.

“I felt like I might be able to help them at a time when naming and identification is becoming increasingly important,” Cerf told TechCrunch. “This is primarily driven by the concept of an AI agent and questions about what authority it has, where does that authority come from, who is responsible for the agent’s actions in this situation, where and how is the agent’s identity established, and why do we trust it?”

These questions are expected to be thorny, Cerf says, because AI agents are much more active than domains, and it’s not yet clear what commitments organizations are making when registering agents.

“This era in the evolution of the Internet and things that rely on it can be fascinating and even frustrating because its capabilities are so dramatically powerful,” Cerf said.

Multiple solutions to this problem are being considered, and Cerf says the key to widespread adoption of the protocol will be its functionality.

“Company X uses Agent Y’s technology and Company A uses Agent C’s technology, but they don’t work with each other,” Cerf says. “No one can do everything you want all agents to do, so you have to rely on user pressure. This is what happened with TCP/IP.”

One key to Innovation Labs’ proposal is that it doesn’t include broad plans to do other types of AI business or own registration data, Klein said. “I think there’s a lot of pushback for hyperscalers releasing[standards]and having their own data,” she told TechCrunch.

And does Cerf think the agent economy is the fate of the Internet?

“I think it’s inevitable,” he said. “But what I think is inevitable is that people will try to do it. We’re basically lazy creatures, so if we can find a way to get an agent to do something, we’re very likely to choose to do it because it’s easier.”