Vint Cerf is working on a plan to unleash AI agents on the open internet
The guy behind TCP/IP is working on a standard for identifying AI agents in the wild. Vint Cerf says his favorite place is where he's never been before. One of the architects of the protocols behind the open internet, Cerf left Google after 20 years last week, but he's not done thinking about the digital future.
Key Takeaways
- Starting today, he's advising Innovation Labs, an organization trying to create the open architecture for AI agents to identify themselves.
Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, which sees domain-name infrastructure as a practical way to hold AI agents accountable and position itself for a future where more online interaction happens between agents than people.
- A variety of standards are beginning to emerge, and Innovation Labs has proposed DNSid , a registry for agent identification that links each one to an existing internet domain name and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time.
Innovation Labs' interim CEO Allie Kline says the company is trialing the standards with several unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies.
- With multiple solutions to the problem under consideration, Cerf says the key to a wide adoption of any protocol will be its functionality.
"Company X uses agent Y's technology, and company A uses agent C's technology, and then they don't interwork with each other," Cerf said.
- "I think there's a lot of organ rejection to a hyperscaler releasing [a standard] and having that proprietary data," she told TechCrunch.
And does Cerf think the agentic economy is the internet's destiny?
- He has closely covered the rise of the private space industry and is the author of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race.
Starting today, he's advising Innovation Labs, an organization trying to create the open architecture for AI agents to identify themselves. Innovation Labs is a subsidiary of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, which sees domain-name infrastructure as a practical way to hold AI agents accountable and position itself for a future where more online interaction happens between agents than people. Cerf joins a handful of other internet luminaries lending their names to the effort.
Most AI agents today stay within proprietary systems, calling on internal resources for specific purposes. But businesses are already envisioning a world where they operate far more autonomously across the internet and interact directly with other agents. So far, a key road block has been a lack of a shared standard for identifying and auditing agents.
A variety of standards are beginning to emerge, and Innovation Labs has proposed DNSid , a registry for agent identification that links each one to an existing internet domain name and uses cryptographic proofs to log its registration over time. Innovation Labs' interim CEO Allie Kline says the company is trialing the standards with several unnamed hyperscalers and identity companies. "I felt like I might be able to help them in a period of time when naming and identification is becoming increasingly important," Cerf told TechCrunch.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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