AWS Launches Agent Registry to Govern AI Workloads

On August 31, 2026, Amazon Web Services launched its AWS Agent Registry into general availability through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. The service acts as a centralized catalog for registering, discovering, and governing AI agents, tools, and skills. It operates across a Governance Plane, which stores records and administrative policies, and a Discovery Plane, which exposes approved records to users. The registry supports four distinct record types: Model Context Protocol (MCP) records, Agent records with Agent2Agent cards, Skill records containing markdown and code, and Custom JSON records.

To combat "shadow AI," the registry features an auto-detection capability at the AWS Organizations level. This automatically identifies agents and MCP servers running on AgentCore Runtime and AgentCore Gateway, pulling them in as draft records. For developers, this eliminates the need to rebuild existing tools, allowing them to programmatically locate resources. The Search API functions as an MCP server, meaning development environments like Kiro and Claude Code can connect natively via Dynamic Client Registration to query the catalog in natural language. Business users can access approved agents through Amazon Quick's chat, flows, and deep research features. Security is managed via AWS IAM or OAuth, with API calls logged by AWS CloudTrail. Early adopters include Southwest Airlines, Syngenta, Sony, and PepsiCo.

The service is currently available in five regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney). AWS offers a consumption-based pricing model with a monthly free tier covering the first 5,000 records, 1,000,000 Search API calls, and 2,000,000 combined Get and List calls. Beyond these limits, storage costs $0.40 per 1,000 records, Search calls cost $0.020 per 1,000 invocations, and List and Get calls cost $0.004 per 1,000 invocations.

AWS plans to expand the registry's capabilities with a roadmap focused on governance, inventory, and discovery. Future updates will introduce security and de-duplication assessments, resource versioning, and auto-detection for Amazon EC2, EKS, and ECS. AWS also plans to release a standalone web application with single sign-on and support public registries for external partners.