Maria Gorskikh

Jin Gao, Maria Gorskikh, Pradyumna Chari et al.

NANDini (Networked Agents Natural Distillation of Interconnected Nodal Intelligence) envisions an automated ecosystem where intelligent agents independently create, process, and exchange data to drive decisions at scale. Realizing this vision requires infrastructure beyond agent discovery and communication: agents must be able to advertise, evaluate, and verify the datasets they hold. Current protocols, including NANDA for federated registry and A2A and MCP for inter-agent messaging, address identity and communication but provide no mechanism for structured data exchange. Existing enterprise data-sharing frameworks, such as IDS-RAM, Gaia-X, and Ocean Protocol, assume human-in-the-loop governance that is incompatible with autonomous, real-time agent interactions. We introduce Data Facts, a core NANDini concept: a lightweight JSON metadata schema that bridges agent discovery and data access through a single pointer, `data_facts_url`, added to an existing Agent Facts registry record. The linked document encodes dataset identity, access tier, whether public, semi-private, or private, endpoint, a time-to-live for freshness validation, and a SHA-256 integrity checksum. For private and semi-private data, we implement a three-layer security pipeline: JWT authentication, capability-scoped gateway authorization, and an A2A credential delegation protocol. Across 840 decision-making evaluations, data-informed agents achieve 100% accuracy versus 35.2% without data access (p < 0.001); TTL enforcement reduces stale-data errors from 37.6% to 8.8%; checksum verification achieves 100% corruption detection at all injection rates; and the security pipeline blocks all 46 forgery attempts with zero data leakage.

Ramesh Raskar, Pradyumna Chari, John Zinky et al. · mit

The Internet is poised to host billions to trillions of autonomous AI agents that negotiate, delegate, and migrate in milliseconds and workloads that will strain DNS-centred identity and discovery. In this paper, we describe the NANDA index architecture, which we envision as a means for discoverability, identifiability and authentication in the internet of AI agents. We present an architecture where a minimal lean index resolves to dynamic, cryptographically verifiable AgentFacts that supports multi-endpoint routing, load balancing, privacy-preserving access, and credentialed capability assertions. Our architecture design delivers five concrete guarantees: (1) A quilt-like index proposal that supports both NANDA-native agents as well as third party agents being discoverable via the index, (2) rapid global resolution for newly spawned AI agents, (3) sub-second revocation and key rotation, (4) schema-validated capability assertions, and (5) privacy-preserving discovery across organisational boundaries via verifiable, least-disclosure queries. We formalize the AgentFacts schema, specify a CRDT-based update protocol, and prototype adaptive resolvers. The result is a lightweight, horizontally scalable foundation that unlocks secure, trust-aware collaboration for the next generation of the Internet of AI agents, without abandoning existing web infrastructure.

Ramesh Raskar, Pradyumna Chari, Jared James Grogan et al.

The emerging Internet of AI Agents challenges existing web infrastructure designed for human-scale, reactive interactions. Unlike traditional web resources, autonomous AI agents initiate actions, maintain persistent state, spawn sub-agents, and negotiate directly with peers: demanding millisecond-level discovery, instant credential revocation, and cryptographic behavioral proofs that exceed current DNS/PKI capabilities. This paper analyzes whether to upgrade existing infrastructure or implement purpose-built index architectures for autonomous agents. We identify critical failure points: DNS propagation (24-48 hours vs. required milliseconds), certificate revocation unable to scale to trillions of entities, and IPv4/IPv6 addressing inadequate for agent-scale routing. We evaluate three approaches: (1) Upgrade paths, (2) Switch options, (3) Hybrid index/registries. Drawing parallels to dialup-to-broadband transitions, we find that agent requirements constitute qualitative, and not incremental, changes. While upgrades offer compatibility and faster deployment, clean-slate solutions provide better performance but require longer for adoption. Our analysis suggests hybrid approaches will emerge, with centralized indexes for critical agents and federated meshes for specialized use cases.