Agent Trust Negotiation: Capability, Delegation, and Provenance Binding for AI Agents

This document defines the Agent Trust Negotiation (ATN) protocol. ATN sits above existing DNS-based agent discovery mechanisms and answers questions that discovery alone cannot: what is the agent permitted to do, under whose authority, with what provenance, and how do two agents reach a verifiable working agreement. ATN binds four artifacts to a DNS-discovered agent identity: