AWS Agent Registry hits GA: catalog your agents

Every company we walk into has more AI agents than anyone can name. A Zapier automation nobody owns. Two MCP servers a developer stood up in a sprint. A Claude project doing invoice triage that lives in one person's account. AWS Agent Registry went generally available on August 31, and it is a bet that the first agent problem is not policy — it is inventory.

What actually happened

AWS announced general availability of Agent Registry, the discovery layer it put into preview back in April. The pitch is a private, governed catalog of agents, tools, skills, MCP servers, and custom resources, searchable by humans through the console and by agents through the registry's own MCP endpoint.

The GA release is the part worth reading. Per the AgentCore release notes, it adds auto-detection with AWS Organizations — the registry crawls member accounts and catalogs AgentCore Runtimes and Gateways with no per-account setup, staying in sync as resources appear, change, or vanish, and as accounts join or leave. It adds customer managed key encryption, so registry data at rest sits under a KMS key you own. It adds PrivateLink, cross-account sharing through AWS RAM with four managed permissions (ReadOnly, Consumer, Publisher, Admin), and provisioning through CloudFormation, Terraform, and the CDK.

Translation: the catalog is now infrastructure. You declare it in code, you encrypt it with your key, and it finds agents you forgot you deployed.

Why it matters for your business

You are probably not running agents across a dozen AWS accounts. That does not make the lesson theoretical.

The reason AWS built auto-detection is that asking teams to register their agents does not work. It never has — not for servers, not for SaaS subscriptions, not for API keys. Discovery has to be automatic or the register goes stale in a month, and a stale register is worse than none because it tells you a comfortable lie about what you run.

So the small-business version of this is not "adopt AgentCore." It is: write down every agent, what it can reach, and who owns it — then make something other than a human keep that list current. A weekly script that enumerates your service accounts, OAuth grants, and scheduled automations gets you most of the value at none of the cost. We build that list before we build anything else, because you cannot scope permissions on an agent you don't know exists.

Sources: AWS What's New — AWS Agent Registry is now generally available, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore release notes.