Before an agent can talk to another one, it has to find it. A proposed working group at the IETF (the body that writes internet standards), DAWN, for Discovery of Agents With Names, wants to standardise exactly that first step and nothing after it. Its charter was moving through the steering group at the end of September 2026. Watch, and do not wait for it before building. Update: the charter was approved on 22 October (see the next issue).
What it would do
The charter limits the work to "a client requesting and obtaining the minimum public discovery information for an AI resource": what kind of thing it is, how to reach it, which protocol it speaks. It says "DAWN focuses on this initial discovery only". The group will consider DNS (the internet's naming system) and mDNS (naming on a local network) as the base for a protocol, and the discovery