IETF DAWN Working Group established: Discovery of Agents With Names (charter-ietf-dawn-01, approved 2026-10-22)

Abstract

Verbatim from the approved charter text (charter-ietf-dawn-01): "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." "Note that discovery may be an iterative process, and may use referrals, direct transfer, delegation, or indirection." 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 are Terminology (Informational), Use Cases and Applicability (Informational), Discovery Architecture (Informational RFC(s)) and Protocol (Standards Track document(s)). Verbatim out of scope for the initial phase: "Exchange of capability information beyond the minimum public discovery information, i.e., catalogs of capabilities are out of scope."; "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." Status note: this approved charter supersedes the proposed charter charter-ietf-dawn-00-08 already recorded in this library; the document name is unchanged but the revision is now 01 and the charter state is Approved.