Evolution of AI Agent Registry Solutions: Centralized, Enterprise, and Distributed Approaches
Aditi Singh, Abul Ehtesham, Mahesh Lambe, Jared James Grogan, Abhishek Singh, Saket Kumar, Luca Muscariello, Vijoy Pandey, Guillaume Sauvage De Saint Marc, Pradyumna Chari, Ramesh Raskar

TL;DR
This paper compares five AI agent registry solutions across centralized, enterprise, and distributed models, analyzing their security, scalability, and maintainability to guide future interoperable AI agent ecosystems.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of diverse registry architectures and offers design recommendations for trustworthy, scalable, and interoperable AI agent discovery systems.
Findings
Distributed approaches enhance resilience and privacy.
Centralized registries offer simplicity and control.
Trade-offs exist between security, scalability, and maintainability.
Abstract
Autonomous AI agents now operate across cloud, enterprise, and decentralized domains, creating demand for registry infrastructures that enable trustworthy discovery, capability negotiation, and identity assurance. We analyze five prominent approaches: (1) MCP Registry (centralized publication of mcp.json descriptors), (2) A2A Agent Cards (decentralized self-describing JSON capability manifests), (3) AGNTCY Agent Directory Service (IPFS Kademlia DHT content routing extended for semantic taxonomy-based content discovery, OCI artifact storage, and Sigstore-backed integrity), (4) Microsoft Entra Agent ID (enterprise SaaS directory with policy and zero-trust integration), and (5) NANDA Index AgentFacts (cryptographically verifiable, privacy-preserving fact model with credentialed assertions). Using four evaluation dimensions: security, authentication, scalability, and maintainability, we…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsDistributed systems and fault tolerance · Optimization and Search Problems · Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence
