Vint Cerf just joined a startup trying to give AI agents a verifiable ID on the internet
One of the people who built the internet thinks AI agents need passports. He's now helping design them.
Key points
- Vint Cerf, co-creator of the TCP/IP protocols that underpin the modern internet, left Google in May 2025 after 20 years and immediately joined Innovation Labs as an adviser.
- Innovation Labs, a subsidiary of DNS registry company Identity Digital, has proposed a system called DNSid to give AI agents verifiable, trackable identities online.
- DNSid links each AI agent to an existing internet domain name and uses cryptographic proofs, tamper-resistant digital signatures, to log registrations over time.
- Innovation Labs' interim CEO Allie Kline says the system is already being trialled with several large cloud and identity companies, though she has not named them.
- No single identity standard for AI agents exists yet, and multiple competing proposals are in play.
Vint Cerf helped invent the rules that let computers talk to each other across the early internet. He is the kind of person whose endorsement other technologists notice. So when he walks out of Google after two decades and immediately signs on to advise a startup, it is worth asking why.
The answer, Cerf told TechCrunch, comes down to one question: who is responsible when an AI agent does something?
An AI agent, to be clear, is software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, booking a flight, placing an order, sending emails, without a human clicking each step. Most agents today work inside a single company's closed system. But businesses are already building agents that will roam the open internet, talk to other agents, and take real actions with real consequences.
That raises an obvious problem. If an agent books a fraudulent hotel room or leaks your data, who owns that mistake? Right now there is no agreed way to check an agent's identity, trace who authorised it, or hold anyone accountable.
Innovation Labs wants to fix that with DNSid. The idea is straightforward: every AI agent gets a registered identity tied to an existing internet domain name, the kind that ends in .com or .org. A cryptographic proof, a mathematical stamp that cannot be quietly altered later, logs that registration permanently. Think of it as a birth certificate for software.
Innovation Labs sits inside Identity Digital, a company that already runs domain-name registries, the databases that match website addresses to servers. That background matters. The domain-name system already connects to nearly every corner of the internet, so building agent IDs on top of it avoids creating yet another parallel network from scratch.
Cerf draws a direct parallel to how TCP/IP, the communication rules he co-wrote in the 1970s, eventually became the universal standard. Not because a committee voted on it, but because users demanded that systems work together. "Nobody can do everything that you might want every agent to do," he said. The same user pressure, he believes, will eventually force rival agent systems to interoperate.
One detail that matters for anyone worried about big-tech control: Innovation Labs says it will not use registration data for other AI business and will not own the data itself. Kline specifically called out the risk of a large cloud company releasing a standard and quietly hoarding the data that flows through it.
Cerf is candid that none of this is guaranteed. "I don't think it's inevitable," he said of an agent-driven internet. But he added: "We are fundamentally lazy creatures, and if we find a way to have an agent do something for us, we're very likely to choose to do that."
Should ordinary people care about AI agent identity standards?
Yes, because the answer to "who is responsible?" determines whether you can get your money back, your data corrected, or your complaint heard. Right now there is no reliable way to audit which company sent the agent that acted on your behalf or against your interests. A working identity standard would change that.
The honest takeaway: you cannot build this yourself, but you can ask the services you use whether their AI agents are traceable and auditable. Companies that cannot answer that question clearly are worth treating with extra caution.
