AS599

AS599 is a legacy autonomous system number registered under ARIN to SRI International, the independent nonprofit research institute headquartered in Menlo Park, California. ARIN's RDAP record marks the autonomous system's original top-level registration on 1990-03-11, with the record itself last changed on 2025-12-01. The ASN's registry name, NISC-AS, points to its origin: SRI historically hosted the Network Information Center (NIC), the ARPANET-era registry function directed by Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, before that role transferred away to an external consortium (AT&T, Network Solutions, and UCSD) in 1992. SRI itself traces back to 1946 as Stanford Research Institute and became fully independent of Stanford University in 1970; it is a research organization, not a commercial network operator or ISP, and its current public site makes no mention of AS599, ARIN, or any active network operations. Consistent with that, every routing data source consulted — RIPEstat, CAIDA AS Rank, and third-party BGP monitors — shows AS599 as completely unrouted today: zero announced IPv4 or IPv6 prefixes, zero peers, zero upstreams, zero downstream customers, and a customer cone consisting of only itself. No PeeringDB record exists for the ASN (a 404 on lookup), and no notable public abuse or security signal was found for it. AS599 is best understood as a decades-old registry holdover from SRI's ARPANET-era NIC role rather than an operating network.

Operator

SRI International (independent nonprofit R&D institute; ARIN org handle SRIINT-Z), 333 Ravenswood Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025 [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/599, https://www.sri.com/about/

Country / RIR

US, ARIN [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/599

Allocated

1990-03-11 — ARIN RDAP autnum TOP-LEVEL registration event (entity-level POC/org dates such as SRIINT-Z's 2023-10-30 registration are decoys, not the allocation date); last changed (top-level) 2025-12-01 [Confirmed, two independent angles agree] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/599

Org status

SRI International is an independent nonprofit R&D institute, founded 1946 as Stanford Research Institute, fully independent of Stanford University since 1970 [Confirmed] — https://www.sri.com/about/

Contacts

John Tomasetti and Mark Anthony Medrano Favis listed as ARIN technical/abuse/NOC POCs for the org [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/599

Security/abuse context (neutral, dated)

no notable public abuse or threat signal found as of 2026-07-16 across general threat-intel, Spamhaus/AbuseIPDB-adjacent, and BGP-hijack-focused sources

Network & routing

Network type

legacy/historical ASN tied to a nonprofit research institute; not an active commercial, transit, or content-delivery network [Confirmed] — https://www.sri.com/about/

Size / routing

dormant — 0 announced IPv4 and 0 IPv6 prefixes; customer cone = 1 ASN (itself), 0 prefixes, 0 addresses; CAIDA AS rank 79,459; 0 upstreams, 0 peers, 0 downstream customers [Confirmed] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS599, https://asrank.caida.org/asns/599, https://bgp.tools/as/599

Peering

no PeeringDB net record exists for AS599 (lookup returns 404); no published peering policy found on sri.com [Confirmed] — https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/599, https://www.sri.com/about/

RPKI

not assessable — no announced prefixes exist to validate ROAs against [Unknown] — https://stat.ripe.net/AS599

Notable usage

AS599/NISC-AS traces to SRI's Network Information Center (NIC), the ARPANET-era registry directed by Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler; the NIC function moved to an external consortium in 1992 [Likely] — https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8jw8fmx/admin/

Related ASNs

none identified with confidence in this pass [Unknown]

ASN / name

AS599, registry name NISC-AS [Confirmed] — https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/599

Analyst note

dormant legacy ASN allocated 1990-03-11 to SRI International, a historically significant ARPANET-era institution (former NIC operator); every routing source agrees on zero announcements and a singleton customer cone. The RDAP top-level last-changed date (2025-12-01) conflicts with a third-party ipinfo.io snapshot citing 2023-11-01 for the same field — the first-party RDAP record is treated as authoritative and the ipinfo.io figure is noted, not adopted.