DNS for AI Discovery#

Jim Mozley, Nic Williams (Infoblox), Behcet Sarikaya, Roland Schott (Deutsche Telekom), Jeffrey Damick (Amazon)

• Why: A quietly ambitious idea: use DNS — not a third-party registry — as the discovery substrate for AI agents. If agentic workloads standardize on DNS for finding each other, discovery becomes cacheable, deterministic, and organization-controlled, and the PM's agents stop depending on brokered directories.
• What: DNS-AID publishes agents via SVCB records at the agent's own name (TargetName, ipv4/ipv6 hints, ALPN carrying agent protocols mcp/a2a alongside h2/h3, well-known URI for the agent card, a cap capability-descriptor locator plus cap-sha256 digest) and an organization-wide index at _index._agents.<domain>. Scope covers "known agent" and "known organization" discovery; cross-domain capability search is explicitly out of scope (derivable). No new RR types, opcodes, or response codes.
• How: One SVCB query for the fast path; TLSA (DANE) records optionally authenticate the agent's TLS endpoint in permissive/preferred/strict postures with WebPKI fallback; DNSSEC-signed zones SHOULD; downgrade resistance via SVCB mandatory=. Security considerations are unusually honest: authentic records can still point at a malicious agent; cap-sha256 is integrity, not trust — trust judgments stay out of band. Experimental extensions (EDNS(0) discovery hints, zero-trust enroll-uri, domain-control validation) are fenced off in a future-work section.
• Where applicable: Public and private networks, including agents hosted in provider domains. Individual draft (-02) — very early, and its fate in dnsop is uncertain — but this is the draft that makes "DNS as the agent directory" concrete, and it intersects directly with the A2A/MCP identity work above.