Google, Microsoft launch open standard for AI agent discovery

Google and Microsoft Unveil Open Standard for AI Agent Discovery

A coalition of major technology companies on June 17 published the Agentic Resource Discovery specification, an open protocol designed to let AI agents find, evaluate, and connect to tools and services across the internet without hard-coded integrations.

Google and Microsoft led the effort alongside Cisco, Databricks, GitHub, GoDaddy, Hugging Face, Nvidia, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Snowflake — eleven organizations in total. The specification is licensed under Apache 2.0 and builds on the AI Catalog data model from the Linux Foundation’s AI Catalog Working Group.helpnetsecurity

How ARD Works

The specification addresses what its creators describe as a missing layer of the agentic web: a standard way for AI agents to discover capabilities across organizational boundaries and verify trust before connecting. ARD defines two core primitives — catalogs and registries. Organizations publish an `ai-catalog.json` manifest at a well-known path on their domain describing available capabilities, while registries crawl and index these catalogs, returning ranked matches to natural-language discovery queries.googleblog

“What’s missing is a standard way for agents to discover capabilities across organizational boundaries and establish trust in what they find,” Google engineers Junjie Bu and Srinivas Krishnan wrote in the announcement. ARD is protocol-agnostic by design — once an agent discovers a capability, it connects using that resource’s native protocol, whether MCP, an API, or another system.microsoft

Enterprise Integration

Google is integrating ARD into its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform through a product called Agent Registry, which provides hosted support for searching, discovering, and managing agentic resources with enterprise governance features including globally unique namespaced URNs, egress policies, and cryptographic identity verification. Microsoft framed the specification as giving AI clients the ability to “tap into new capabilities automatically”.googleblog

GitHub, owned by Microsoft, simultaneously launched Agent Finder for GitHub Copilot, which uses discovery indexes to let Copilot locate the right capability for a task without manual configuration. Snowflake described ARD as addressing “a real and growing issue: how to discover all the agents available to an enterprise user through whatever interface they are using”.github

Notable Absences

The coalition’s membership is notable for who it excludes. OpenAI, which created the Model Context Protocol competitor ecosystem, and Anthropic, which originated MCP itself, are not among the launch partners. ARD positions itself not as a replacement for protocols like MCP or Google’s Agent-to-Agent protocol, but as a discovery layer that sits above them — helping agents decide which capability to use before invocation occurs.getaibook