AWS Introduces Agent Registry and Supports New ARD Open Specification

AWS has introduced the AWS Agent Registry, a centralized catalog designed to help organizations manage and discover AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and custom tools. The registry allows administrators to configure authorization via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) or JSON Web Tokens (JWT), while providing a workflow for publishing, curating, and approving resources to ensure security and quality standards.

To address the challenge of managing agentic resources across diverse environments like multi-cloud and on-premises infrastructure, AWS is supporting the Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification. ARD is an open standard, available under the Apache License 2.0, intended to act as an interoperability layer. By providing a common protocol for describing and discovering resources, ARD aims to enable federation across different registries without requiring proprietary connectors. This allows organizations to maintain local control over their catalogs while facilitating broader discovery paths for agents and tools.