DNS-Anchored Durable Identity for AI Agents (DNSid)

Autonomous software agents are being deployed across enterprise, cloud, and cross-organizational boundaries. These agents negotiate, transact, delegate, and produce work products that persist beyond their own runtime. The standards identified for agent identity collectively address runtime authentication, authorization, lifecycle management, and tool interaction, but a gap remains: a durable, governance-backed identifier that binds an agent to an accountable entity in a way that any system can verify independently. DNSid addresses the accountable layer of identity: the durable ownership anchor that existing agent identity standards do not provide. This document specifies DNSid, a minimal identity primitive that assigns each agent a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) under a domain controlled by its accountable entity, and publishes a structured set of pointers in DNS TXT records to the agent's cryptographic keys, lifecycle log, and operational status. DNSid uses accountable-entity-controlled signatures for record integrity and an abstract append-only ledger for lifecycle history. It is designed to sit beneath existing identity, authentication, authorization, and agent interaction standards without competing with them.