Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD) is an open, federated specification that puts a discovery layer in front of agents: instead of preinstalling tools, the agent can search for capabilities at runtime. The proposal has broad industry participation (Microsoft, Google, GoDaddy, Hugging Face and more) and is intended as a standard, not a centralized product.

What problem does ARD solve?

Today many agents still follow an "install first, use later" model: the developer pins URLs, the user connects plugins, and the list of tools grows manually. What happens when the ecosystem reaches thousands of ad-hoc surfaces? It doesn’t scale.

Dumping every description into the LLM context window isn’t the answer either: the window has a limited budget and descriptions are often too thin to disambiguate capabilities. ARD moves selection outside the LLM: a registry indexes tools with rich signals (publisher identity, representative queries, compliance attestations, tags) and exposes a REST endpoint that accepts natural language searches. The agent queries that registry and executes what the search returns. It’s moving from static catalogs to intention-based search.