The Agentic Resource Discovery Specification (developers.googleblog.com)

The Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) specification has been launched, providing a much-needed standard for publishing, discovering, and verifying AI capabilities across the web. As AI agents increasingly operate within a complex ecosystem involving multiple platforms and organizations, ARD addresses critical questions about capability location, selection, and safety in connections. This open specification enables agents to securely share and connect tools, regardless of their underlying frameworks or providers, fostering greater interoperability within the AI community. Significantly, ARD democratizes AI resource discovery akin to how the open web democratized information. It utilizes two core primitives—catalogs and registries—to standardize capability publication under an organization’s domain, allowing agents to dynamically find and establish secure connections to the right resources. With Google Cloud’s Agent Registry offering enterprise-grade support for these features, organizations can ensure trust and governance at scale by managing agentic resources with verification mechanisms and compliance considerations, such as HIPAA. The ARD specification, now available under the Apache 2.0 license, marks a crucial step towards an open, decentralized agent ecosystem.