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

Vint Cerf says his favorite place is where he’s never been before.

One of the architects behind the open internet, Cerf left Google after 20 years last week, but he’s not done thinking about the digital future. As of today, he advises Innovation Labs, an organization trying to build open architectures for AI agents to prove themselves.

Innovation Labs is part of Identity Digital, a DNS registry company, which sees domain name infrastructure as a practical way to hold AI agents accountable and position them for a future where most of the internet’s communication takes place between agents rather than people. Cerf joins a handful of other Internet luminaries lending their names to the effort.

Most AI agents today reside within proprietary systems, calling on internal resources for specific purposes. But businesses are already seeing a world where they operate freely across the Internet and communicate directly with other agents. To date, a significant roadblock has been the lack of a common standard for identifying and investigating agents.

Various standards are beginning to emerge, and Innovation Labs has proposed DNSid, a registry to identify agents that link each to an existing Internet domain name and use cryptographic evidence to document its registration over time. Innovation Labs interim CEO Allie Kline says the company is testing standards with hyperscalers and a few unnamed ID companies.

“I felt like I might be able to help them in a time where naming and identification are very important,” Cerf told TechCrunch. “This is largely due to the perspective of AI agents and the question of what authorities they have, where they get those authorities, who is responsible for the agent’s behavior in this context, and where and how its ownership is established, and why. [you’d] trust it.”

Those questions promise to be difficult, Cerf said, because AI agents are more active than domains, and it’s not clear what responsibility an organization is making when it signs up.

“It’s going to be an interesting – and at the same time maybe annoying – time in the evolution of the Internet and things that depend on it, because performance is so powerful,” Cerf said.

With many solutions to the problem under consideration, Cerf says the key to any protocol’s widespread adoption will be its functionality.

“Company X uses the technology of agent Y, and company A uses the technology of agent C, and they do not cooperate,” said Cerf. “Nobody can do everything you might want an agent to do… so we’ll have to rely on pressure from users. This is what happened with TCP/IP.”

One key to Innovation Labs’ proposal is that it doesn’t come with extensive plans to do other types of AI business or to have subscription data, Kline said. “I think there is a lot of rejection of the hyperscaler [a standard] and having that proprietary data,” he told TechCrunch.

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

“I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he said. “But what I think is inevitable is that people will try to do that. We’re lazy creatures, and if we find a way to have an agent do something for us, we’re more likely to choose to do that because [it’s] it’s simple.”