Soon the internet will be full of AI agents acting on our behalf. Right now, there is no reliable way to tell who stands behind any of them. Vint Cerf, one of the people who built the internet, wants to fix that.

Cerf co-designed TCP/IP, the protocol that lets the internet’s independent systems talk to each other. He left Google last week after 20 years. Now he is joining the advisory council of Innovation Labs, a group building an open identity layer for AI agents, the company announced.

The missing layer

The problem is simple to state. Most AI agents today live inside one company’s systems. But firms want them roaming the open web, dealing directly with other agents. There is no shared way to prove who owns an agent, or who answers for what it does.

Innovation Labs is a division of Identity Digital, a firm that runs domain-name registries. Its idea, called DNSid, would give each agent a lasting identity tied to an existing domain name, backed by cryptographic proof. It has already submitted the design to the internet’s main standards body.

Why Cerf signed up

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Cerf frames it as the internet’s next big architectural problem. The trigger, he told TechCrunch, is “the question of what authorities they have, where they have derived those authorities, who is accountable.”

He expects it to be messy. “It’s going to be a fascinating, and at the same time maybe even exasperating, period,” he said. Rival standards are already appearing. Cerf thinks none will win on politics, only on what works, as happened with TCP/IP.

Keeping it open

The pitch is that no single tech giant should own the standard. Innovation Labs says it will not hold the registration data itself. “There’s a lot of organ rejection to a hyperscaler releasing a standard and having that proprietary data,” interim boss Allie Kline told TechCrunch. The group says it is already trialling the system with several unnamed cloud giants.

An agent-shaped internet

The stakes are rising because agents are spreading fast, from Amazon’s revamped Alexa to enterprise tools, and they are already causing trouble. Researchers have tricked them into leaking private code and even running a full ransomware attack. Regulators are scrambling too, from China’s new agent rules to Delaware’s plan to give agents a legal identity.

Cerf is not sure the agent-run internet is inevitable. But he thinks people will try to build it anyway. “We are fundamentally lazy creatures,” he said. If an agent can do a job for us, we will let it.