Google and Microsoft spearhead new Agentic Resource Discovery AI specification

On June 17, 2024, Google, Microsoft, GitHub, Hugging Face and ten other technology companies released a draft open specification called Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD). The Apache‑2.0 licensed spec, developed under the Linux Foundation’s AI Catalog workgroup, defines how AI agents can automatically locate, verify and connect to tools, skills, APIs and other agents on the Internet through publicly hosted catalogs (ai‑catalog.json) and registries.

ARD moves the discovery process from a manual, pre‑configured step to a runtime query, aiming to simplify scaling of AI‑driven services. Reference implementations were announced from GitHub (Agent Finder for Copilot), Hugging Face (Discover Tool), Cisco (Agent Directory) and Google, which plans to add ARD support to the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform’s Agent Registry in the coming months.

The specification also includes security controls such as cryptographic metadata and trust manifests to mitigate new attack vectors that arise when catalog files become high‑value targets.