The big battle for .agent – Domain Name Wire | Domain Name News

Google, OpenAI, and Meta are among the companies fighting to control the .agent domain.

Many predicted that .agent  would be very popular in the 2026 new top level domain expansion round. They were right.

With 13 applicants, it is the most contested string.

It also includes heavyweights like Google, Meta, Alibaba, and OpenAI.

It will be interesting to see whether any smaller companies withdraw their applications or move to a replacement string. This auction could easily exceed $50 million.

Interestingly, a community applicant is also in the mix. Open Agent Registry, Inc. confirmed to Domain Name Wire that it will proceed with the Community Priority Evaluation.

After reading the public part of its application and the CPE scorecard, it seems unlikely to succeed. It seems to mistake creating a community for creating the community around agents. It’s as if DNForum or NamePros applied to represent the .domain community. (That’s an existing TLD, by the way).

Then again, I was wrong about some of the CPEs in the last round, so who knows. And Google applied for .mcp as a community, but it’s unclear whether it will proceed with CPE.

Only two applicants for .agent have replacement strings: XYZ with .village and Identity Digital with .kernel.

Here’s a look at the applicants:

Charleston Road Registry Inc. – Google. Last round it paid $25 million for .app.

ECHO Domain Co L.L.C. – EchoStar Corporation (DishDBS) is behind this company. It’s interesting to see the company returning to the 2026 round because it was slow to launch the domains it acquired in the 2012 round.

Elegant Leader Limited – Chinese internet giant Alibaba. It could go deep on this one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese government wants a stake.

FireLabs Capital Ltd – This applicant is associated with Meitu, which makes AI imaging products.

Intercap Registry Inc. – Intercap is a surprisingly large applicant in this round.

Internet Land & Cattle LLC – This company was formed in late July. It also applied for .human and .robot. Michael Ho, a co-founder at D3, operates the company. It is a separate business from D3.

Ipollo Tech Ltd – Nano Labs Ltd, a fabless semiconductor company in China, is behind this application.

Meta Registry Holdings LLC – One of five generics Meta applied for. The others are .aiglasses, .metaverse, .superintelligence, and .wearables.

Open Agent Registry, Inc. – This is the community applicant. It operates .Agent Community.

OPENAI OPCO, LLC – The ChatGPT operator also applied for .gpt, .agi, .asi, and several others.

Radix Technologies Inc SEZC – It will be interesting to see how much Radix digs in on this application. It will face many other battles, and it could put its focus on its .agentic or .agi applications instead.

Rein Check, LLC – This is Identity Digital.

XYZ.COM LLC – XYZ didn’t apply for a lot of other AI-related TLDs, so it will be interesting to see how much it wants to commit to .agent.

ICANN will reveal on November 17 whether any applicants dropped or switched to a replacement string.