AI Service Indicators

A community-maintained dataset of DNS hostnames for generative-AI applications and APIs has been published to let organizations measure observed AI-service access from DNS, proxy and firewall logs. Each row maps a hostname pattern to a service, vendor, category and role — distinguishing chat use from API calls, agents, sign-in, CDN and telemetry — and marks app, api and agent roles as counts_as_usage=1 while portal, web, auth, cdn, telemetry, download and other roles count as 0. The maintainers caution that a DNS lookup shows a device contacted a service, not that anyone submitted a prompt, and advise reporting results as observed access, counting distinct devices rather than queries.

A community-maintained list of DNS hostnames for generative-AI applications and APIs, for measuring observed AI-service access from DNS, proxy or firewall logs. Each row maps a hostname pattern to a service, vendor, category and role, so you can tell chat use from API calls, agents, sign-in, CDN, telemetry and plain website visits. Where a vendor publishes the hostname, the row links to that page. A DNS lookup shows a device contacted a service, not that anyone submitted a prompt. Report results as observed access, count distinct devices rather than queries, and remember that devices are not people. | Column | Meaning | |---|---| | host pattern | Lowercase hostname; matches any run of characters, including dots | | service | Product, e.g. ChatGPT , Codex , OpenAI API , GitHub Copilot ; a vendor name OpenAI for names shared across its products | | vendor | Company operating the service | | category | Chat assistant , Coding assistant , AI platform APIs and cloud model hosting , AI browser , Research , Creative | | role | What the hostname does; see below | | counts as usage | 1 for app , api and agent roles; 0 otherwise | | source | Vendor documentation or application URL; blank where the vendor publishes none | | confidence | How the role was established; see below | | notes | Interpretation caveats | | role | Meaning | Usage? | |---|---|---| | app | The interactive product: web app, its live-response and voice endpoints, mobile and desktop app backends, coding-assistant service endpoints | yes | | api | Public programmatic inference endpoint | yes | | agent | Coding-agent, connector and MCP endpoints | yes | | portal | Developer console keys, billing | no | | web | Marketing site, docs, help, status, community, email links | no | | auth | Sign-in, SSO, bot checks | no | | cdn | Static assets, user content, CDN alias CNAME targets | no | | telemetry | Analytics, metrics, experiments and feature flags | no | | download | Installers and updates | no | | other | A vendor's catch-all for subdomains not yet classified; review these rather than count them | no | | confidence | The role comes from | |---|---| | documented | The vendor's documentation, linked in source | | evidence | DNS answers or the server's own responses, described in notes for example a CNAME to a billing or help-desk provider, or a redirect | | hostname | The hostname alone | | low | The hostname or weak evidence; treat as a hypothesis | confidence describes the role. A source on a catch-all or hostname row shows that the domain belongs to the vendor, not what each subdomain does. Corrections backed by vendor documentation are especially welcome. Using role , you can tell, for example, ChatGPT chat chatgpt.com , ws.chatgpt.com apart from OpenAI API calls api.openai.com , Codex agents codex-cloud-backend.chatgpt.com , and someone reading openai.com or help.openai.com . No field contains a comma or quote, so any CSV reader, awk -F, , or a SIEM lookup can load the file as-is. 1. Lowercase the queried hostname and strip any trailing dot. 2. Try rows in file order ; the first matching row wins. Specific names come before their wildcard catch-alls api.openai.com before .openai.com . 3. A pattern matches the whole hostname: .chatgpt.com matches ab.chatgpt.com but not fakechatgpt.com or chatgpt.com.example.net . Apex domains are listed separately. 4. A hostname matching no row is not in scope. These are the semantics of a Splunk WILDCARD lookup with max matches=1 . - Report by role , not by domain. Telemetry and experiment names for example ab.chatgpt.com fire on page load and are often queried by more devices than the app itself. There is no blanket "all openai.com = ChatGPT" rule. - An API hostname identifies the service contacted, not the application, person, model or billing account behind it. api.anthropic.com , for example, is used by Claude Code as well as by custom applications. - A usage role shows that a service was in use on a device, not what the person did with it. DNS cannot show whether someone generated an image, ran an agent or only opened the app. - Some vendor names are reached from other companies' websites. bzr.openai.com , for example, is OpenAI's ad-measurement pixel, embedded in advertisers' sites, and is queried by devices that never use ChatGPT. - Keep non-usage roles out of usage counts. auth , cdn , telemetry and web names can corroborate activity, but browsers prefetch them, and they are reached by people who never use the product. - Count distinct devices per service per day or week, not queries. Caching, retries, background refresh and prefetching distort query counts. - Classify the name the client asked for , not CDN alias CNAME targets in the response. DNS-based measurement misses: - off-network devices; - clients using encrypted DNS DoH/DoT to outside resolvers; - locally run models; - AI features embedded in other SaaS products, which share the host application's hostnames; - calls made from a vendor's backend. Some services OpenRouter, Azure AI Foundry, Bedrock, Vertex AI front many models, and DNS cannot tell which model was used. Implement the matching rules above. For each pattern, a regex of ^ + the pattern with replaced by . everything else escaped + $ is enough. In Splunk, load the CSV as a lookup with match type = WILDCARD host pattern and max matches = 1 . On high-volume DNS indexes, filter on indexed terms before classifying: python3 scripts/splunk terms.py prints a keyword filter that covers every pattern. New services, endpoints and corrections are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/synapticcybersecurity/ai-service-indicators/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md . Every change must pass python3 scripts/validate.py , which also runs automatically on pull requests.