Latent-Addressed Networking: A Federated Overlay Architecture for AI-Native Nodes

Existing peer-to-peer overlay networks (IPFS, Tor, Briar, Reticulum, Veilid, Yggdrasil) treat content as opaque bytes addressed by a hash of those bytes. This paper proposes a different addressing scheme: **latent-addressed networking**, in which the canonical form of content is a latent embedding produced by a shared world model, and raw bytes are an artifact of one possible reconstruction. The architecture combines a substrate-agnostic transport layer, a capability-based handshake, a federated routing layer in the Akademset tradition, a latent-addressed content layer (the novel contribution), and a local synthesis layer that translates user intent into network operations. We sketch the wire-level architecture, identify the threat model, and enumerate the open cryptographic and systems questions a reference implementation would need to resolve. We do not provide an implementation. The goal of this paper is to claim the architectural ground and invite further research.