AI Agent Gets Its Own Domain: .agent Top-Level Domain Community Bidding Starts Next Month, 700 Companies Including Brave and Alibaba Cloud Join

A community of over 3,000 members (including 700+ companies and 2,300+ developers) is applying to ICANN for the .agent top-level domain, advocating that this AI naming layer be governed by the community rather than a single enterprise. Privacy browser Brave has registered the domain and joined the initiative, with participants including Ollama, Datadog, Netlify, Sourcegraph, Alibaba Cloud, Product Hunt, etc.

The community believes .agent is to the AI Agent network what DNS was to the early internet: whoever controls the naming layer can decide which Agents are discoverable or blocked. The community governance model aims to ensure transparent registration policies, predictable pricing, and access rules not controlled by a single company's board.

ICANN's application window opens in late April 2026 and lasts 90 days. For contested top-level domain allocations, ICANN uses the Community Priority Evaluation mechanism, scoring on four dimensions: community size, domain relevance, registration policies, and community endorsement. Member quantity and diversity directly affect the bidding result.