IESG approves standalone ML-KEM key agreement for TLS 1.3

What happened

The IESG approved draft-ietf-tls-mlkem, "ML-KEM Post-Quantum Key Agreement for TLS 1.3", on 3 September 2026. The Datatracker history logs the move to "Approved-announcement to be sent" at 07:26 UTC and approval at 09:12 UTC, the same day it sat on the IESG telechat agenda. No RFC number is assigned yet. The document registers ML-KEM-512, ML-KEM-768 and ML-KEM-1024 as named groups in the TLS supported groups registry, which is ML-KEM standing on its own rather than the hybrid X25519MLKEM768 that browsers and clouds already run. Its intended status is Informational and the author is D. Connolly of SandboxAQ.