What is an AI agent registry?
By Identra · Updated
An AI agent registry is a centralized, governed catalog of the AI agents, tools, and MCP servers an organization builds or deploys. It records what each agent is, who owns it, and what it can access, giving security and platform teams the inventory that discovery, reuse, and AI governance depend on.
Key numbers
- 82% of enterprises have unknown AI agents running in their IT infrastructure (Cloud Security Alliance survey commissioned by Token Security, 2026)
- Only 21% of organizations maintain a real-time inventory of active AI agents (CSA Securing Autonomous AI Agents report, commissioned by Strata Identity, 2026)
- 65% of organizations experienced an AI agent-related incident in the past 12 months (Cloud Security Alliance survey commissioned by Token Security, 2026)
Why do organizations suddenly need agent registries?
AI agents are being built everywhere at once. Engineering teams wire them into CI pipelines, business units buy them inside SaaS products, and individual employees assemble them from low-code builders. Each one carries credentials, calls APIs, and touches data, yet most were never recorded anywhere. The result is AI agent sprawl: a growing population of autonomous software actors that no single team can enumerate, and a fast-expanding layer of shadow AI operating outside official channels.
The numbers confirm the blind spot. A 2026 Cloud Security Alliance survey commissioned by Token Security found that 82% of enterprises have unknown AI agents running in their IT infrastructure, and 65% experienced an AI agent-related incident in the prior 12 months. A separate CSA report commissioned by Strata Identity found that only 21% of organizations maintain a real-time inventory of active agents. An agent registry exists to close exactly this gap: it is the system of record that turns an unknown agent population into a governed one, the same way an asset inventory anchors any agentic AI security program.
What does an agent registry contain?
A registry is more than a list of agent names. To be useful for both developers and security teams, each entry needs enough metadata to answer three questions: what is this agent, who is accountable for it, and what can it do? In identity terms, every registered agent is a non-human identity with an owner, credentials, and permissions that must be tracked like any other.
- Agent name, description, version, and the framework or platform it runs on
- A named human owner or sponsoring team accountable for the agent's behavior
- The AI agent identity it authenticates with, and the credentials or tokens behind it
- The tools, APIs, and MCP servers the agent can invoke, a critical input for MCP security reviews
- Permissions and data scopes, so reviewers can check the entry against least-privilege policy
- Endpoints, supported protocols, approval status, and lifecycle state
How does an agent registry work?
Registration happens in two ways. Teams can register agents manually through a console or API, or the registry can discover them automatically by querying live endpoints and pulling metadata from the agent or MCP server itself. Automatic discovery matters because manual catalogs decay: the agents most likely to cause incidents are the ones nobody bothered to register.
Governance is enforced through approval workflows. In cloud implementations such as AWS Agent Registry, which entered preview in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore in April 2026, administrators approve a resource before it becomes discoverable to other teams, and every access is written to an audit trail. Google Cloud's Agent Registry takes a similar shape, cataloging agents, MCP servers, and tools behind its Gemini Enterprise platform and exposing them over standard MCP and Agent2Agent protocols. Microsoft approaches the same problem from the directory side with Entra Agent ID, which records each agent as an identity in Entra rather than an entry in a catalog. Discovery then works like an internal marketplace: developers search semantically for a capability, find an approved agent or tool, and connect to it instead of building a duplicate. That reuse path also concentrates delegation onto vetted components rather than one-off integrations.
How is an agent registry different from other inventories?
Agent registries overlap with several existing catalogs, and the boundaries matter when deciding what to buy or build.
- Model registry: tracks trained model versions and artifacts for MLOps. An agent registry tracks deployed agents, which wrap models with tools, credentials, and autonomy.
- CMDB or asset inventory: tracks servers, devices, and applications. Agents change too fast and spawn too dynamically for traditional CMDB workflows.
- NHI inventory: tracks service accounts, keys, and workload identities. Every agent is an NHI, but a machine identity inventory alone misses agent-specific context like tool access and human sponsorship.
- API catalog: tracks what services expose. An agent registry tracks the autonomous consumers of those APIs, which is where identity sprawl now grows fastest.
Where does a registry fit in agent governance?
Inventory is the precondition for every other control. You cannot scope permissions for an agent you have not found, rotate credentials you do not know exist, or decommission an agent with no recorded owner. A registry gives AI governance programs their foundation: a definitive list of agents, each tied to an accountable human and an approved set of capabilities.
From that foundation, the rest of the lifecycle follows. Registration feeds onboarding and approval. Recorded scopes feed access reviews and zero standing privileges initiatives. Ownership records feed offboarding when a sponsoring employee leaves, the step most often skipped in the NHI lifecycle. And because a registry only describes intended behavior, it pairs naturally with runtime identity security, which observes what agents actually do once they run.
How Identra thinks about it
Necessary but not sufficient: that is our verdict on registries. A catalog entry describes what an agent should be on the day it was approved; agents drift the moment they gain a new tool, credential, or delegation path, and cloud vendor registries can catalog agents built elsewhere but still anchor governance in one vendor's control plane while real estates span SaaS platforms, multiple clouds, and homegrown frameworks. Treat the registry as the declared state of your agent population, then continuously reconcile it against observed reality: which identities agents actually use, which data they actually touch, and which registered owners have actually left. The gap between the two lists is where shadow AI and stale-agent risk live, and closing it is a runtime identity security problem, not a cataloging one.
Go deeper: The Non-Human Majority
Frequently asked questions
Is an agent registry the same as a model registry?
No. A model registry versions trained models and their artifacts for MLOps teams. An agent registry catalogs deployed agents, which combine a model with tools, credentials, memory, and autonomy, and adds governance metadata such as owners, approval status, and permitted scopes.
Do the major cloud providers offer agent registries?
Yes. AWS Agent Registry entered preview within Amazon Bedrock AgentCore in April 2026 as a private, governed catalog of agents, tools, and MCP servers with approval workflows and CloudTrail auditing. Google Cloud offers Agent Registry as the catalog and governance layer for its Gemini Enterprise agent platform. Both can catalog agents and tools built outside their own cloud, but each anchors governance in its vendor's control plane and the registries do not interoperate, so multi-cloud estates still need a consolidated view.
Can an agent registry stop a rogue agent?
Not by itself. A registry is an inventory and approval system, so it tells you which agents are sanctioned and what they were granted. Detecting an agent that exceeds its grants, or one that never registered at all, requires runtime monitoring of agent identity and behavior layered on top of the registry.
Who should own the agent registry?
In practice, platform engineering operates the registry as developer infrastructure, while security and identity teams define the approval policies, required metadata, and review cadence. The critical rule is that every entry names a human owner, because unowned agents are the ones that linger after their purpose ends.