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Analysis · Agent Identity

Six standards are racing to name the agents. None of them has won.

Registrars, registries, a CDN and three IETF drafts are all building the identity layer for autonomous software. The proposals are incompatible, most are pre-launch, and the thing they are all competing to index barely exists yet.

By the AgentNews desk · Updated 3 August 2026

The question sounds simple: when one piece of software calls another on your behalf, how do you know what you are talking to, and who is answerable for it? Over the past year that question has attracted an unusual concentration of infrastructure money, and the answers arriving are not converging.

The largest retail registrar in the world has proposed a naming service that treats an agent the way DNS treats a host — a structured name, a set of records, a certificate chain, and a discovery marketplace on top. It is currently in developer preview. Separately, the operator of the largest portfolio of top-level domains has announced what it calls a birth certificate for agents: a neutral, persistent identifier that records ownership, transfer and revocation, and deliberately declines to do authentication or policy enforcement at all. It was announced in April and has no general-availability date.

A third effort, developed in the open rather than as a product, anchors accountability rather than identity — publishing signing keys in DNS, requiring DNSSEC throughout, and grading operators across four levels of verification from bare cryptographic provenance up to regulator-grade licence checks. It is being standardised through the IETF as a pair of Internet-Drafts and is not yet launched.

Around those three sit a major CDN's signature-based bot-verification scheme with its own registry draft, at least two further IETF proposals for agent identity and hardware-anchored registration, and a payments-side effort to establish who an agent is specifically at the moment it tries to spend money.

What is striking is not the disagreement — early infrastructure always disagrees — but the asymmetry. Every one of these efforts builds a directory. Comparatively little capital is going into the entities that would populate one. A registry with nothing registered in it is a database.

Protocols & Infrastructure

The stack underneath
Standards

The naming problem is harder than the signing problem

Cryptographic proof that a request came from a given key is largely solved. Agreeing on what to call the thing holding the key — and who gets to issue that name — is where the competing proposals actually diverge.

Analysis · 6 min read
Discovery

What a machine-readable agent card should actually contain

A stable identity document, declared capabilities with methods and prices, and working interfaces. The third is where most implementations quietly fail — and where crawlers notice first.

Explainer · 4 min read
Infrastructure

Why exact-match domains are re-pricing

When software rather than people does the finding, a name that literally describes a capability stops being a branding preference and starts being an addressing decision. The scarce names were all registered decades ago.

Market · 5 min read

Machine Commerce

How agents pay each other
Payments

Per-request settlement arrives before per-seat pricing dies

Metered, per-call payment between software is now technically routine. The commercial models built on top of it are not — and pricing an agent's work remains mostly guesswork.

Analysis · 5 min read
Accountability

Know-your-agent is becoming know-your-operator

Several proposals have quietly converged on the same conclusion: you cannot hold software accountable, so the useful question is which legal person stands behind it — and how a stranger verifies that cold.

Policy · 6 min read
Security

The access-control gap nobody budgeted for

Surveys of organisations deploying agents keep finding the same pattern: incidents are already happening, and the controls assumed to be in place mostly aren't.

Security · 4 min read
Explainer

The agent stack, in plain language

Most coverage of the agent economy collapses several distinct layers into one word. They fail differently, they're standardising at different speeds, and confusing them is why so much of the commentary contradicts itself.

The short version: transport is close to settled, identity is contested, and the asset layer — the actual entities doing work at real addresses — is the thinnest part of the stack.

  • NamingWhat the agent is called, and who issues that name. Multiple competing schemes; no winner.
  • Identity & accountabilityProving the agent is what it claims, and which legal person answers for it. Most contested layer.
  • AttestationThird parties vouching for facts about the operator — jurisdiction, registration, licences. Barely started.
  • Transport & capabilityHow agents actually call each other and describe what they can do. Closest to settled.
  • PaymentPer-request machine settlement. Working now, ahead of the identity layer above it.
  • The asset layerThe entities themselves — real addresses, running services, declared capabilities. Thinnest part of the stack.

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