Discovery of Agents With Names (DAWN) — proposed IETF Working Group charter (charter-ietf-dawn-00-08)

Abstract

Proposed IETF Working Group charter "Discovery of Agents With Names (DAWN)", revision charter-ietf-dawn-00-08. Verbatim from the charter: "Clients often need to discover information about AI systems and resources (e.g., AI agents) before interacting with them. This requires obtaining information about how to reach the resources and what they offer. The focus of the DAWN Working Group (WG) is on how a client can discover public properties of AI resources to facilitate subsequent interactions such as selection, invocation, or communication. DAWN focuses on this initial discovery only and does not include open-ended search, semantic matchmaking, ranking, or selection of an AI resource based on capabilities or user intent." Scope is limited to discovery within immediate proximity, within an organization, and between cooperating parties with trust relationships over the public Internet; the charter states the WG "will specify an interoperable and generic discovery mechanism that builds on existing protocols and tools, benefits from established trust models, supports proven delegation and federation architectures, and allows organizations to have independently published discovery information", and that it "will consider DNS and mDNS as mechanisms upon which to build a discovery protocol". Deliverables: Terminology (Informational), Use Cases and Applicability (Informational), Discovery Architecture (Informational RFC(s)), and Protocol (Standards Track document(s)). Verbatim out-of-scope list for the initial phase: "Exchange of capability information beyond the minimum public discovery information"; "All communication beyond the initial discovery process"; "AI resource indexing and searching across the wider Internet"; "Identity management of AI agents, tools, and skills"; "Trust management and trust evaluation methods beyond secure content exchange between DAWN parties". Proposed milestones: DAWN Protocol specification submitted to the IESG by December 2027; DAWN Architecture by January 2028; optional terminology by June 2027. The charter states the WG will coordinate with WIMSE and OAuth as well as WGs related to DNS, discovery, identities or AI.