Amazon Web Services made AWS Agent Registry generally available on August 31, 2026, giving organizations a centralized catalog for registering, discovering, and governing AI agents, tools, and skills. The service, available through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, is priced on a consumption basis with a monthly free tier.
Two Planes Separate Governance From Discovery
AWS Agent Registry is a fully managed discovery service where teams publish MCP servers, agents, agent skills, and custom resources into a searchable catalog with an approval workflow. AWS describes it as operating across two planes: a Governance Plane, which stores all registered records and the policies admins configure for them, and a Discovery Plane, which exposes only approved records to consumers. Search combines semantic and keyword matching, so a natural-language query and an exact name lookup can both return relevant records.
The registry accepts four record types. MCP records describe a Model Context Protocol server along with its tools, resources, and prompts. Agent records carry an Agent2Agent agent card defining an agent and its skills. Skill records hold markdown skill definitions with associated code or packages. Custom records accept any valid JSON descriptor. Records move through a lifecycle from draft to pending approval, then to approved or rejected, with curators able to deprecate a record at any point. AWS CloudTrail logs registry API calls for audit.
Access is configured per registry instance using either AWS IAM credentials or OAuth through JSON Web Tokens from a corporate identity provider. Admins can run one organization-wide registry or separate instances by business unit, environment, or compliance requirement, each with its own authorization model.
Auto-Detection And External Synchronization
An auto-detection capability targets what AWS calls shadow AI. When an admin enables endpoint detection at the AWS Organizations level, the registry automatically detects agents and MCP servers running on AgentCore Runtime and AgentCore Gateway across accounts in the organization. Detected resources appear in a centralized view and flow into a connected registry as draft records that follow the standard review and approval lifecycle. The registry can also synchronize metadata directly from external MCP or A2A server endpoints using OAuth, IAM, or unauthenticated access.
Publishing works through the AWS console, command-line interface, or APIs, and publishers can wire record updates into continuous integration and delivery pipelines. When a record reaches pending-approval status, the registry emits an Amazon EventBridge event that can route into an organization-specific approval workflow. AWS notes the service does not ship with built-in approval workflows; it provides the hooks for each organization to build its own.
For consumers, the Search API is exposed as an MCP server, so agents can locate tools and skills programmatically. MCP-compatible development environments, including Kiro and Claude Code, can connect to a registry instance natively using Dynamic Client Registration, letting a developer query the catalog in natural language from inside the editor. Business users can reach approved records through Amazon Quick after an admin connects a Quick tenant to one or more registries, with agents surfaced in Quick Chat, Automations, Flows, and Deep Research. AWS PrivateLink keeps the registry reachable in locked-down network environments.
Customers And Partners Cited
AWS named several organizations already using the service. Southwest Airlines chief information officer Lauren Woods said the airline went from dozens of agents and tools scattered across technology teams to a single governed catalog, with developers finding approved capabilities through semantic search instead of rebuilding existing work. Syngenta enterprise architect Sandeep Rayasa said the company built its AI agent governance on the registry, reviewing and approving every capability before sharing it across the organization. AWS also cited Sony, Mitsubishi Electric, PepsiCo, and Amdocs as users or early adopters.
On the partner side, AWS said Informatica is building integration so its hosted MCP servers are listed and discovered through the registry, and Check Point is integrating the registry to give customers continuous discovery and security posture assessment of their Amazon Bedrock AgentCore workloads. PwC Australia, Caylent, and Slalom also provided statements in the announcement.
Availability And Pricing
AWS first released Agent Registry in preview on April 9, 2026. The service is now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).
Registry pricing is consumption-based with no upfront commitments. Charges are based on the number of records stored and the number of Search, List, and Get API calls made against them. A monthly free tier covers the first 5,000 records, the first 1,000,000 Search API calls, and the first 2,000,000 combined Get and List API calls. Above those thresholds, records are billed at $0.40 per 1,000 records, Search API calls at $0.020 per 1,000 invocations, and List and Get calls at $0.004 per 1,000 invocations.
AWS laid out a roadmap organized around four themes. Planned governance work includes surfacing security, compliance, and de-duplication assessments inside the approval workflow, plus resource versioning with full audit trails. The inventory theme extends auto-detection to resources running on Amazon EC2, Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECS, with federation partnerships planned for resources outside AWS. Discovery plans add policy-driven visibility, per-resource observability metrics, and dependency graphs. AWS also plans a standalone web application with single sign-on authentication that does not require the AWS console, and public registries that let enterprises showcase agentic capabilities to customers and partners. Working code examples are published in the agentcore-samples repository.
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