AWS: Agents shouldn't be secret, so we built a registry for them

Your agent will be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered

AI agents should not be secret agents, at least in corporate environments. But when companies deploy software automations, they don't always have visibility into what their roboscripts are actually doing.

Amazon Web Services aims to illuminate the enterprise agent ecosystem with its Agent Registry, which the infrastructure biz describes as "a single place to discover, share, and reuse AI agents, tools, and agent skills across your enterprise."

AWS' Agent Registry is not the only agent registry. Microsoft has its Entra Agent Registry and an Azure Agent Registry. Google Cloud has its Agent Registry. There's an Agent Client Protocol (ACP) Registry. And there are many more third-party registries. The Register notices such things.

AWS intends its registry to help make agents more visible within organizations, to provide some measure of control over agent publication and discovery, and to ensure sufficient distribution so that disparate teams aren't reinventing the wheel with redundant agents.

Agent Registry is built to work with Bedrock AgentCore, AWS's platform for building, deploying, and managing agent software. It provides a central repository for storing metadata describing agents, tools, MCP servers, agent skills, and associated resources, linked to authorship info, protocol details, services exposed, and invocation instructions. It supports standards like MCP and A2A, in addition to custom schemas, and it's designed to work wherever agents are hosted, whether that's Agent Core, other cloud services, or on-premises.

Adding records to the registry can be done through manual metadata submission via the AWS console, AWS SDK, or API. The registry will also fetch records automatically after being connected to a properly configured MCP or A2A endpoint. 

Querying the registry can be done via AgentCore Console, APIs, or any MCP-compatible client like Kiro or Claude Code.

In Amazon-packaged remarks, Pete Hirsch, chief product and technology officer at Zuora, a revenue management biz, talked up the advantages of having a source of truth for agents.

"This centralized approach enables teams to find and reuse existing assets rather than rebuilding from scratch," Hirsch said via AWS comms. "Standardized metadata ensures each agent and tool includes consistent details on ownership and capabilities, giving teams end-to-end visibility and accountability across the entire agent ecosystem."

AWS expects that agents built using AgentCore, Amazon Quick Suite, and Kiro will be automatically indexed in the registry and that metadata from the operation of those agents will be surfaced to show what exists and how well they function. Organizations can look forward to viewing data about their agents in the AWS Resource Access Manager. 

The AWS Agent Registry is being offered in preview via AgentCore in five regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland). ®