Identity Digital Inc. has spun off Known Systems AI Inc., a new company tasked with making AI agents accountable to the organizations that created them. The spinout carries DNSid, an open framework Identity Digital describes as a "birth certificate for AI agents." The move matters because AI agents already initiate financial transactions and move data across company boundaries with minimal human involvement, yet no standard currently identifies who answers for them.
How DNSid ties an agent to its owner
DNSid was released earlier this year by Identity Digital's Innovation Labs, the AI agent identity initiative launched at the start of the year. The framework combines the Domain Name System, public key infrastructure and an immutable blockchain ledger to give each agent a persistent identity linked to its creator. That identity travels with the agent across organizational boundaries, so the creating entity can be held responsible wherever the agent acts. It also lets agents interact with third-party platforms without negotiating a trusted relationship with each one separately.
The design addresses a scale problem that bilateral trust cannot solve. Existing identity and access management tools authenticate an agent and govern what it may do inside one environment, but they do not answer who is accountable once the agent crosses into another platform. Many businesses already run thousands of AI agents, and maintaining pairwise trust relationships between each agent and multiple third parties is not feasible at that volume. Identity Digital argues that what the market needs is a shared accountability layer working across every platform and organization rather than a chain of one-off agreements.
As an independent company, Known will push DNSid toward becoming an open standard for agent identification and build the tooling organizations need to scale accountability. Concrete steps already taken include an Internet-Draft submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force and collaboration with the Linux Foundation through the Agentic AI Foundation and LF Decentralized Trust. The company also reports a number of enterprise customers and relationships with policymakers in the U. S. government. Identity Digital Chief Executive Akram Atallah explained that keeping the work inside the parent would have limited its reach, since agent accountability has to function across companies, platforms and ecosystems.
What this means for companies deploying AI agents
For companies that already operate fleets of agents, the practical change is a candidate answer to the vendor-lock question of cross-platform responsibility. If DNSid gains traction as a standard, a firm could point to a single registered identity when a partner platform asks which entity stands behind an autonomous action, instead of negotiating separate trust arrangements with every counterparty. Small companies gain the most leverage here: they rarely have the legal or engineering capacity to broker bilateral agreements with large platforms, while a shared layer levels that asymmetry. Large enterprises, in turn, get a way to govern thousands of agents without multiplying integration work.
The caveats are significant. DNSid's reliance on blockchain and public key infrastructure introduces operational dependencies that buyers must evaluate, and an Internet-Draft at the IETF is an early stage rather than a ratified standard. Known is also a young company with an interim CEO, Allie Kline of Ethos Capital, still leading a search for a permanent leader, and its customer base is described only as "a number of enterprise customers" without names or contracts. Identity Digital remains one of its biggest investors with a board seat, and Ethos Capital, the primary owner of Identity Digital, is supporting Known, so independence is partial in practice. Buyers should ask which platforms already accept DNSid identities and what the governance model looks like once the founding team hands over.
The clearest marker to watch is whether the IETF Internet-Draft advances and whether additional platforms publicly commit to recognizing DNSid identities. Adoption by even a few major agent runtime environments would signal that shared accountability is moving from proposal to infrastructure, and would tell companies that registering their agents now is a decision with a shelf life rather than an experiment.
