December 16, 2025
New link, who dis?
AI URI Scheme – Internet-Draft
IETF floats ai:// links for robots and models — commenters scream “but why”
TLDR: IETF proposed an “ai://” link and companion protocol so apps can call AI agents and robots, with fallbacks to normal websites. The crowd fired back with confusion, memes, and a big question—what problem does this solve—and a naming spat over “ai” vs “robots,” making this a hotly debated maybe-standard.
The IETF just dropped a draft for an “ai://” link — a new way to point to AI agents, models, tools, and even robot tasks — and the internet did what it does best: argue. The proposal says these special links would be handled by an AI-specific protocol (AIIP), or tunneled through normal websites via HTTPS gateways so users never notice. Translation: your bank could quietly call an AI service behind the scenes while you click around as usual. Sounds tidy… until the comments arrived.
One dev confessed, “I build coding agents… I’m struggling to map this onto the set of things I do,” while another dangled a bounty: “100 points to anyone who can explain this.” A helpful soul dropped a newer version of the draft — and then immediately asked the killer question: what problem does this solve? Elsewhere, someone wondered if this is just a new tunnel for remote agent protocols, while another blasted the wording about “autonomous systems and robots,” asking why call it “ai” instead of “robots” and noting most web traffic is already bots talking to bots.
Meanwhile, the example link — ai://bank/service/payments?amount=10 — became instant meme fuel: “Press ai:// to pay $10 to a robot cashier.” Verdict from the crowd: intriguing idea, murky purpose, spicy naming debate, and a whole lot of “explain like I’m five.”
Key Points
- •The draft defines an ai: URI scheme for AI-addressable resources and introduces AIIP to resolve and invoke ai:// URIs.
- •It follows RFC 3986 for URI syntax and uses BCP 14 normative terminology (RFC 2119, RFC 8174).
- •Because many clients may not support ai:// natively, the draft details HTTPS gateway interoperability and mapping.
- •Discovery methods include HTTP Link headers, HTML link relations, a /.well-known/aiip JSON, and optional DNS SRV/TXT records.
- •Gateways must parse/normalize ai:// URIs, reject malformed inputs, authenticate to AI endpoints, and verify response provenance; the draft expires April 5, 2026.