AWS Backs Open Agentic Resource Discovery Standard

On August 24, 2026, Amazon Web Services published a detailed plan outlining how the open Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification will integrate with its own AWS Agent Registry. Currently available in preview through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, the AWS Agent Registry provides a centralized catalog for AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, tools, and skills. However, this catalog is restricted to the AWS ecosystem. By aligning with ARD, AWS aims to solve the multi-cloud challenge, allowing organizations to discover resources across different cloud providers, SaaS platforms, and on-premises systems without building custom connectors.

ARD is an open-source specification licensed under Apache 2.0, first announced on June 17, 2026, by a broad industry working group. While AWS contributed feedback, the standard's creators and collaborators include Google, Microsoft, Hugging Face, GoDaddy, Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, NVIDIA, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake. The architecture relies on two main components: a catalog file named "ai-catalog.json" hosted on an organization's domain, and registries that act as search engines to crawl, index, and query these files using plain-language requests.

For developers and administrators, this integration promises federated discovery without migrating assets. The AWS Agent Registry maintains its strict governance, utilizing AWS Identity and Access Management or JSON Web Tokens for security, and exposing catalogs as remote MCP endpoints. ARD acts strictly as an external interoperability layer for discovery, leaving execution and security enforcement to the local registry. This means practitioners can publish their tools once and make them searchable everywhere, while retaining full control over access permissions and execution protocols.

Although AWS has not announced a firm delivery date for this integration, its alignment signals a unified industry direction. Google is already planning to add native ARD support to its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform in the coming months. With the major cloud providers aligning on the same open standard, enterprise developers can look forward to a future where agentic infrastructure is highly interoperable, operating much like the domain name system does for the broader internet.