Innovation Labs by Identity Digital Convenes Infrastructure, Security, and Finance Leaders to Help Shape Accountability Framework for AI Agents

Developing response to growing challenge in AI: establishing persistent ownership and accountability for agents operating across platforms, organizations, and environments

David Conrad, Charles Ryan, Paul Sagan, Teresa Shea and Corey Thomas among founding members of Advisory Council following the launch of DNSid

BELLEVUE, Wash., June 30, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Innovation Labs, a division of Identity Digital focused on building the accountability anchor for AI agents, today announced the formation of its Advisory Council, bringing together leaders who helped build, scale, and secure the internet’s core infrastructure at a moment when those same coordination challenges are emerging for autonomous AI systems.

AI agents are already making decisions, accessing systems, and conducting transactions across organizations and platforms. Yet, there is still no universal way to identify who is accountable for them. As agents move across environments, platforms, and organizations, there is no persistent accountability layer that maintains a durable link between an agent and its owner.

The Council brings together leaders who are helping shape and secure the modern internet around a shared concern: the infrastructure required to determine accountability for AI agents is not keeping pace with their deployment.

The Advisory Council includes*:

• David Conrad, former CTO of ICANN, founder and first Director General of APNIC, and a consultant on Internet technologies, naming, and addressing
• Charlie Ryan, Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center, international financier, and venture capitalist
• Paul Sagan, former CEO of Akamai and Catalyst Advisor at General Catalyst
• Teresa Shea, former Director of Signals Intelligence at the NSA and a leader in cybersecurity and national intelligence
• Corey Thomas, Executive Chair of Rapid7 and board member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Council on Foreign Relations
  
  

Collectively, the group brings deep expertise in global DNS coordination, national security, cybersecurity, international finance, venture capital, regulation, and enterprise-scale infrastructure. All of these fields required shared standards before trust could scale. Their mandate is to guide Innovation Labs as it works to establish a similar foundation for an agentic internet.

“Throughout the history of the internet, periods of rapid innovation have ultimately depended on common infrastructure standards that allow independent players to establish trust at scale,” said Paul Sagan, former CEO of Akamai and member of the Innovation Labs Advisory Council. “As AI agents become more autonomous and interconnected, the challenge is no longer simply making them more capable. It is ensuring the underlying foundations for trust, accountability, and coordination evolve alongside them.”

DNSid establishes a durable, globally resolvable identity for AI agents, effectively a birth certificate that binds each agent to verifiable ownership across platforms and environments. This accountability record persists regardless of how a system is modified, deployed, or transferred.

Today, AI systems may have different identities across cloud, infrastructure, and application environments, but no persistent accountability record that survives across platforms or organizational boundaries. DNSid introduces this missing coordination layer, allowing organizations to verify ownership and establish accountability without requiring pre-negotiated trust relationships.

The same conditions that required shared standards to scale the internet are now emerging again for AI agents. Innovation Labs and its Advisory Council are focused on helping ensure that trust and accountability can scale alongside them.

About Innovation Labs
Innovation Labs is a division of Identity Digital focused on building the accountability anchor for AI agents. As autonomous systems become more interoperable and capable, they introduce risks that existing frameworks were not designed to manage, starting with the need for a consistent way to verify ownership across organizational boundaries. Innovation Labs combines Identity Digital’s DNS expertise with blockchain to establish a global coordination layer for AI system identity, and participates in open standards communities, including the Linux Foundation. For more information, visit DNSid.ai.

About Identity Digital
Identity Digital Inc. simplifies and connects the online world with domain names and related technologies to empower people to build, market, and own their digital identities. With the world’s largest portfolio of TLDs, including .llc, .pro, .world, .fyi, and .studio, Identity Digital supports over 34 million domains on its registry services platform. The company also enables customers to discover, register, and manage domain names through its registrar, name.com. Headquartered in Bellevue, WA, Identity Digital is a global company with approximately 250 employees. For more information, visit identity.digital.

*Titles and affiliations are for identification purposes only, and do not imply endorsements or affiliation by these third-party organizations with Identity Digital or Innovation Labs.

Media Contact:
Aimee Miller
Broadsheet Communications
aimee@broadsheetcomms.com

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