CNNIC launches ATI, an AI agent identity layer built on DNS and PKI

The China internet registry and industry partners opened the platform in Beijing. Alibaba Cloud is the first vendor listed as having completed integration.

China’s domain-name registry and a group of standards bodies, carriers, research institutes and cloud companies on Tuesday released a public platform meant to give software agents a checkable identity and a way to find one another on the existing internet.

The China Internet Network Information Center posted the notice Wednesday. The release came a day earlier at the 2026 (7th) China Internet Infrastructure Resources Conference. The product is the Intelligent Agent Trusted Infrastructure Platform, also given in English as AI Agent Trust Infrastructure, or ATI.

CNNIC said ATI is aimed at large-scale interconnection among agents. It does not invent a parallel naming system. It reuses two facilities already running at internet scale: the Domain Name System and public-key infrastructure. Those two pieces, the center said, are what supply trusted identity and a trusted connection.

Authentication sits on three supports. DNS anchors the identity. Dual CA certificates are used to show the identity is legitimate. Transparency logs are used so registration records cannot be quietly rewritten.

The handshake, as CNNIC described it, is short. An agent looks up its counterpart in DNS. Both sides finish mutual authentication. They open an encrypted channel. Only then do they exchange traffic or hand off work.

The center framed the design around two slogans it put in quotation marks: “有身份、找得到、信得过、管得住” and “一次注册,全球可发现、可验证.” In the same notice those lines are rendered as the aims of giving an agent an identity, making it findable, making it trustworthy and keeping it manageable — and of registering once so the agent can be discovered and verified worldwide.

Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group is named as the first cooperating vendor. CNNIC said the company has already finished docking with the platform.

That first-integrator line is the operational fact executives will care about. Tencent Cloud Computing Co. and Shanghai Electronic Certification Authority appear on the same release list. The notice does not say those two have completed the same integration.

The other named co-releasers were the China Communications Standards Association, the Internet Society of China, the Chinese Institute of Electronics, the China Institute of Communications, the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, the China Academy of Industrial Internet, and the research institutes of China Unicom, China Mobile and China Telecom, plus other units not listed by name.

This is not the first public cut of the same stack. On July 9, at the 2026 (25th) China Internet Conference, CNNIC and Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Group put out a minimum viable version and opened invite-only testing. That earlier CNNIC notice said the work sat on the National Engineering Laboratory for Internet Domain Name Management Technology and the Beijing Key Laboratory of Agent Identification and Security Assurance Technology. It also said a production version was planned for the infrastructure-resources conference. Tuesday’s event is that date.

A separate CNNIC explainer, posted in July, is still the clearest map of who does what. ATI is described there as an industry-facing platform built on a “CNNIC + partners” split. CNNIC runs the registration service. It takes registration requests from agent service providers, checks key registration data for compliance, issues identity certificates to agents that pass, and writes state information into the transparency log. That registration desk is called the trust anchor for the whole chain.

Partners sit around that anchor. They handle registration applications, trusted discovery, trusted connection and integrity monitoring. The same explainer lists six core capabilities: registration management, compliance certification, a dual-certificate system, transparency logs, trusted discovery and connection, and integrity monitoring. The closed loop, CNNIC wrote then, is meant to deliver “一次注册,全球DNS可发现” — register once, discoverable worldwide through DNS.

Alibaba Cloud’s own product pages use a different product name, Agent Trust Service, or ATS, for the same joint build. Those pages say an enterprise registers an agent through the ATS console, picks up an identity certificate and DNS records, and gets a globally unique trust label called an ATI Name bound to a standard internet domain. CNNIC’s private CA issues the identity certificate. Alibaba Cloud acts as the registration authority. The cloud documentation also describes a second certificate in the pair, ACME domain checks, transparency-log sealing and DANE/TLSA records used in the discovery path. Registration, those pages say, is a console workflow. It is not a live SDK or API signup.

For a developer, the point of the reuse argument is cost and compatibility. DNS lookups and certificate checks are already in the toolchain. CNNIC’s launch text does not claim a new wire protocol. It claims the old ones, pointed at agents.

For an executive, the point is governance across vendors. CNNIC said ATI is supposed to stay open in architecture, standards and ecosystem, with a multi-party split rather than a single-cloud lock. The July explainer used the words neutral, open and jointly built, and said more vendors would be added. Tuesday’s notice repeats that expansion plan.

What comes next is written as a work list, not a date. CNNIC said it will keep extending platform functions, bring in more partners along the industrial chain, push research on trusted agent interconnection, write standards and try the stack in typical scenarios. The stated end state is secure, trusted interconnection among agents that live on different platforms and under different operators, inside what the center called an open, collaborative and trusted agent internet.

No speaker quotations appear in the Sept. 30 CNNIC notice. The slogans above are the only lines the center itself set off in quotation marks.

Subscribe
Notify of
0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
0
Would love your thoughts, please comment.x
()
x