AWS backs an open spec for agent tool discovery

Agentic Resource Discovery went live August 24 at agenticresourcediscovery.org, released under Apache 2.0. AWS contributed to it but doesn't claim authorship, per AWS's post announcing the spec.

The problem it targets is real if you've built with agents: every registry of tools, skills, or sub-agents is an island. An agent built against AWS's catalog can't see what's registered in a GCP project or an internal SaaS tool without someone writing a custom connector for that specific pair. Multiply that across clouds and vendors and you get a connector count that grows with the square of the number of registries.

ARD proposes federation instead, closer to how DNS lets any resolver find any domain without a direct line to every registrar. A registry that speaks the spec can be queried by any other, and an agent that knows how to ask one registry can, in theory, ask all of them.

AWS Agent Registry is the first implementation. It exposes a remote MCP endpoint, so any MCP client can query the catalog directly.

A federation protocol needs more than one participant to matter. AWS writing the reference implementation is a strong signal it thinks this is worth building, not proof anyone else will adopt it. The post doesn't name other registries committing to support ARD, so whether this becomes a real standard or a spec with one client depends on who shows up next.