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

What AWS announced

Amazon Web Services has rolled out an Agent Registry — a central catalog for discovering, sharing and reusing AI agents, tools and agent skills across an enterprise. It has been reported that the service is intended to shine a light on what corporate automations actually do, providing metadata about authorship, protocols, invoked services and capabilities. The registry is built to work with Bedrock AgentCore and supports standards like MCP and A2A as well as custom schemas, and it is designed to index agents whether they run in the cloud or on-prem.

How it works

Adding records can be done manually via the AWS console, SDK or API, and it has been reported that the registry can also pull records automatically from properly configured MCP or A2A endpoints. Querying is possible through the AgentCore Console, APIs or any MCP‑compatible client such as Kiro or Claude Code. AWS expects agents built with AgentCore, Amazon Quick Suite and Kiro to be automatically indexed and says operational metadata will be surfaced so organizations can see what exists and how well it functions; that metadata will be accessible through AWS Resource Access Manager. The Agent Registry is available in preview in five regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo) and Europe (Ireland).

Why it matters

Why should anyone care? Because in many companies AI agents have been the new shadow IT — useful, fast, and a pain to govern. Centralized metadata promises less duplication, clearer ownership and better accountability. In Amazon‑packaged remarks, Pete Hirsch of Zuora praised the registry as a “source of truth” that helps teams find and reuse assets instead of rebuilding them from scratch. Sounds sensible. But does the market need another registry? Microsoft, Google Cloud and several third parties already offer their own registries and protocols; fragmentation is a real risk.

The trade-offs

A registry brings visibility, but also questions: who controls publication, who audits behavior, and who pays for the additional telemetry? Enterprises worried about security and compliance will want clear guardrails — and fast. With a proliferation of registries and protocols across vendors, the messy work of interoperability and governance is only getting started. Still, for organizations tired of secret agents running loose across their networks, a stamped, indexed and discoverable roster might feel like relief.

Sources: The Register