13 Bids for .agent. Your Agent Can Get to Work Today.
If you’re building an agent service, your next release has enough dependencies already. A thirteen-way contest over who gets to run .agent doesn’t need to become another one.
ICANN's October 7 reveal put 13 applications for .agent on the table, including applications from Google, OpenAI and Meta. Meanwhile, public .agent registration at HeadlessDomains.com has been open since April 27. Builders already have a way to register the name and publish the records other software needs to find their agent.
The head start is yours to use. Give your service a name, connect it to the work it does, and let the next six months add up to something customers recognize.
Thirteen ICANN applicants, and a long road to a launch
Google's Charleston Road Registry, OPENAI OPCO and Meta Registry Holdings appear in ICANN's application directory alongside specialist registry businesses and Open Agent Registry. The last of those is pursuing a community application through Agent Community, which confirmed its place in the field on October 8.
You can see how much commercial attention .agent is attracting: companies building AI platforms and companies selling domain names have arrived at the same word. Their applications still leave you without a confirmed date for registering an ICANN .agent name.
The October 15 DomainSherpa discussion gets unusually direct about the wait. Around 46:25, while discussing .agent's community application and the steps before a possible auction, a panelist says:
“delegation might happen five years from now.”
Hear the estimate in context. The video starts at 46:00 and includes the lead-in to the quote.
The guests see long-term value in new gTLDs. Their concern here is how uncertain timing complicates a registry’s business plan.
Five years is the panelist's estimate, not an ICANN announcement or a guaranteed delay. Even delegation, the addition of a TLD to the root, is a different milestone from general registration opening.
ICANN's own published schedule shows the work still ahead: String Confirmation Day on November 17, 2026; a community input and objections period ending March 16, 2027; and a prioritization draw in the first half of 2027. String evaluation is expected to take 180 days, with application processing beginning after that stage. Contested applications then have further issues to resolve.
A calendar full of process milestones doesn't give an agent business a launch date. And software businesses have an awkward habit of needing to operate this quarter.
.agent is live: your head start on legacy DNS and ICANN began in April
HeadlessDomains.com was opening .agent to builders months before the thirteen-applicant field became public. Mike Michelini's April 12 update described the sunrise period for trademark holders and announced April 27 public access. His April 26 update confirmed the next day’s public opening.
On April 27, SkyInclude published a live registration demonstration covering .agent and machine payments. The launch activity report records the wider rollout, including agent quickstarts and registration videos. Builders had registration walkthroughs they could follow themselves.
By August, LearnHNS was examining the registrar's agent-operated registration model. The discussion had moved into how software searches, pays for and maintains its own name.
Think about what fits into the months between April and October: a first release, feedback from customers, a model change, the moment you finally fix the onboarding that seemed so obvious when you built it. Keep a recognizable name through all of that, and people have somewhere familiar to return.
.factory and .zen are in the contest too
The overlap with namespaces already available through HeadlessDomains.com extends beyond .agent. ICANN's published applications include these five strings from the live Headless Domains catalog:
| Namespace | Primary applications | A use for a Headless Domains name today |
|---|---|---|
| .agent | 13 | An agent's public identity and service records |
| .factory | 4 | A production system or automated workflow |
| .zen | 8 | A focused project, studio or tool |
| .protocol | 1 | A protocol's specifications and official services |
| .hey | 1 | A public introduction to a person, project or community |
Counts refer to primary applications, excluding replacement-string entries, in ICANN's published directory. The field can change before November 17. These uses come from the Headless Domains live namespace catalog.
.factory has its own commercial story. USA Made in America announced its application in August, targeting manufacturers and technology businesses. For builders using Headless Domains today, a factory can also be a software production system: an operation that takes an input and produces something useful. Explore how to name your production system in the .factory guide.
For your agent service, start with a name that says what’s doing the work: .agent.
Stop waiting on ICANN's legacy DNS, put a headless .agent name to work with your AI agent now
Imagine a research agent whose work starts in a chat window, moves into a scheduled workflow and later becomes a paid service. Its model changes. Its hosting changes. Customers still need a recognizable name and a way to find its current capabilities and endpoints.
A .agent name at HeadlessDomains.com gives that service a persistent public reference. Its records can connect operator information, a machine-readable manifest and the endpoints where the work happens. The agent integration guide covers registration, record management and a public resolver that returns identity, lifecycle and discovery information. Endpoint authentication and permission to act stay with the service.
HeadlessDomains.com and SkyInclude maintain CLI and API infrastructure for these names. An agent can use those routes directly, without waiting for a conventional browser to add native support.
Explore the .agent launch history and ICANN timeline for more background.
Start with one working service. Register its .agent name and publish a clear description of its job, its manifest and its current service endpoint. Then look up the name from another client and follow the returned records to that endpoint. When someone asks where to find your agent, you have a name that leads to its current work.
By the time the registry contest produces its outcome, what do you want people to know your agent for? The research it delivers, the customers it helps, the tedious job it finally takes off somebody’s hands?
Give that work a name now. Spend the head start making it worth remembering.
Give your agent the HeadlessDomains.com setup guide and put its name to work.
See what to do after registration
Turn your name into a working identity. Follow these seven steps after registering a Headless Domain.