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

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. 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 system to create identities for agents and link each one to an existing internet domain name, using 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. “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.”

Those questions promise to be thorny, Cerf says, because AI agents are so much more active than domains, and it’s not yet clear what commitment an organization is making when they register one.

“It’s going to be a fascinating — and at the same time maybe even exasperating — period in the evolution of the internet and the things that depend on it, because the functionality is so dramatically powerful,” Cerf said.

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. “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.”

One key to Innovation Labs’ proposal is that it does not come with broader plans to do other kinds of AI business or own the registration data, Kline says. “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?

“I don’t think it’s inevitable,” he said. “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 an agent do something for us, we’re very likely to choose to do that because [it’s] just easier.”