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On Wed, Jul 08, 2026 at 01:22:19PM +0000, Artur Hecker wrote:
> Hi Brian, hi Alex, hi Toerless
>
> +1, I am also all for what you are writing there.
>
> I agree that it could be presented at DAWN or agent2agent lists/meetings.
> However, maybe slightly differently from Brian, I think that most of the
> current efforts somehow concentrate on discovery of agents, yet I tend to see
> a bigger issue elsewhere. I do not mind discovery, but, a bit like Toerless,
> I fail to see what is so new about it, agents or not.
Supporting better agent communication is an important topic that would be great
for
the IETF to pick up. We did suggest aspects for it at last IETFs CATALIST
non-WG forming
BoF. I think the group that will best look into it so far is DMSC, not DAWN.
> The document below essentially says: go away with the SDN controller and put
> an LLM on top, which will auto-program the network from the high-level
> intents expressed by the owner. For this to work, the ACP, BRSKI and GRASP
> serve as the required and potentially sufficient foundation.
More like the lowest common denominator. More would be better, but i think you
can't
build something reliable without them. So definitely if we can't agree on
nothing
else of how to do network management with the help of agentic AI, we hopefully
do
at least agree that it's a good opportunity to highlight the importance of the
ANI
to do it reliably.
> Personally, I agree with this vision, I would have loved that to happen way
> earlier, but somehow community lost interest in that... Now, the whole story
> about agents jump-starts the next chapter of the same story.
Router software infrastructure is highly ossified, and even when it's being
re-implemented, then folks who do it have no clue what they're missing out on.
> Some remarks:
> - maybe instead of "heuristic" we should talk about probabilistic behaviour?
> As per its definition, a heuristic is an approach to problem solving, which
> might not be optimal or rationalized yet good enough [cmp. Wikipedia]. I am
> not sure LLM's answers are, in that sense, good enough, as they often turn
> out to be awfully wrong at times. That's the reason we can't work with that
> in critical systems (yet?).
Good point on terminology. And the core proposal of the draft effectively is to
not let agents directly do arbitrary changes to the network directly, but
instead
let them program automation and control exhaustive testing of the automation
programming. All the stuff we would do without agentic AI too.
Or said differently: Letting an AI agent directly reconfigure a network every
router
one-by-one instead of writing a program to do it is just like a human doing it
manually - becoming exhausted and erraneous and unpredictable when it has to
happen over and over.
Obviously, we need to find good distinctions between this "LLM level problem"
and e.g.:
the use of specific DNN for problems that can perfectly live with probabilistic
solutions -
such as traffic engineering.
> - if we are serious about ACP/GRASP/BRSKI as foundation, we would need to
> show that, even in spite of potential misjudgments by LLM or programming
> errors done by it, ACP would always remain "the last Mohican": ACP should be
> the last to fail, i.e. in presence of a potentially unverified programs
> produced at will by the LLM/foundation model, the ACP must act like an
> implementation of a protected mode in an OS, like an OS kernel if you will,
> preserving the possibility to repair/remove/terminate misbehaving programs.
> Such that we can have a bunch of simple yet reliable tools on top of ACP to
> clean away any nonsense introduced by LLM/foundation models, and, also very
> important, to be able to isolate the effects of such programs by separating
> concerns and enforcing "control app manifests" in a distributed system.
Indeed. And maybe we should use the opportunity to write this up anew for the
agentic AI crows
to also come up with new better terminology. Instead of or in addition to ANI
maybe
call it the "Network wide OS kernel" - aka: more good marketing suggestions
more than welcome!
Cheers
Toerless
>
> Regards
> Artur
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian E Carpenter <[email protected]>
> Sent: Monday, July 6, 2026 3:50 AM
> To: [email protected]; Anima WG <[email protected]>
> Subject: [Anima] Re: I-D Action: draft-eckert-anima-ai4an-00.txt
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm all for what you are saying in this draft, but I think you also have to
> address it to the DAWN people and everybody working on agentic
> communications. Look at draft-he-dawn-ipv6-agent-aware-framework, for
> example; it has very little to do with IPv6. Maybe you should ask for a slot
> at the DAWN BOF? (DAWN = Discovery of Agents, Workloads, and Named Entities.)
> At least point out that ANIMA/GRASP has been working on discovery of agents
> since the dawn of time (pun intended).
>
> Also, the trust boundary issue we just discussed re
> draft-soulard-anima-grasp-router-problem-statement is going to be relevant. I
> see a clear clash between the type of trust boundary that BRSKI provides and
> how the agentic community is looking at trust.
>
> Nit: s/autonomous/autonomic/ globally
>
> (We chose "autonomic" at the beginning of ANIMA, by analogy with the
> autonomic nervous system, so I think we need to be consistent.)
>
> Regards/Ngā mihi
> Brian
>
> On 06-Jul-26 11:28, [email protected] wrote:
> > Internet-Draft draft-eckert-anima-ai4an-00.txt is now available.
> >
> > Title: AI for Autonomous Networking
> > Authors: Toerless Eckert
> > Alexander Clemm
> > Name: draft-eckert-anima-ai4an-00.txt
> > Pages: 17
> > Dates: 2026-07-05
> >
> > Abstract:
> >
> > This document builds on the architectural foundation of the IETF
> > ANIMA "Autonomous Network Infrastructure" to propose an architecture
> > for in-network intelligence in support of network automation.
> >
> > The key aspect of this architecture is the use of AI programmed and
> > validated software running decentralized on the network.
> >
> > The IETF datatracker status page for this Internet-Draft is:
> > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-eckert-anima-ai4an/
> >
> > There is also an HTMLized version available at:
> > https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-eckert-anima-ai4an-00
> >
> > Internet-Drafts are also available by rsync at:
> > rsync.ietf.org::internet-drafts
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > I-D-Announce mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send
> > an email to [email protected]
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